


The Way We Rise

by JungMichan



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ballet, Band Fic, Bullying, Dancer Zhang Yi Xing | Lay, Disabled Character, Dyslexia, First Kiss, First Love, Fluff and Angst, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, Learning Disabilities, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mentioned Huang Zi Tao | Z.Tao, Mentioned Lu Han, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Panic Attacks, Physical Abuse, Swimming, it's not too graphic though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27648464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JungMichan/pseuds/JungMichan
Summary: A story in five parts. Sehun pines after the beautiful, popular swim team captain, Kim Jongin. Yixing dreams of ballet, and of music, and of being loved. Jongin pushes himself beyond the brink, and finds that there's more beauty to be found in life than he'd ever imagined. Baekhyun's wings have been broken, but the return of Yixing into his life may be his salvation. Chanyeol holds a heavy secret close, but maybe one day he'll learn how to open his heart.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Zhang Yi Xing | Lay, Kim Jongin | Kai/Oh Sehun
Comments: 23
Kudos: 57





	1. Sehun

In the first French class of the year, Kim Jongin can’t pronounce his own name.

“Felix,” says Mademoiselle, gesturing with long, white, eloquent hands as if by doing so she can coax the correct sounds out of Jongin’s mouth. “Fe-lix. _Souffler –_ you must _blow_ through ze teeth _. F-F-F-Felix_.”

“Pee-rik-su,” Jongin spits earnestly, and flashes a helpless smile, and even Mademoiselle has to forgive him.

Sehun notices Jongin for the first time that day.

The early autumn light falls in shafts through the windows and pools in bright white squares along the linoleum floor of the classroom. One of these shafts catches and holds Jongin in a glowing force field, a square window-spotlight shining just for him. His hair is kind of parted in the middle, kind of not, disheveled and perfect and feathering over his left ear like a bird’s wing. It is dyed a sort of white-gold, paler than the dustier, deeper gold of his skin, and the afternoon sunlight glows off him like light shining through amber, like fields of barley, like cinnamon sugar, like liquid joy. How apt Mademoiselle is, Sehun thinks, in bestowing upon Jongin the French name Felix, despite the low likelihood of his classmate ever being able to pronounce the letter F. Felix means joy, means luck, means happiness. It means all that is good in the world.

Sehun watches Jongin through the corner of his eye as the other boy sits back down at his desk and Mademoiselle bestows the name Michel upon his neighbour. Jongin has the broad shoulders, muscular chest and slender hips of any self-respecting swim team captain, as well as permanently reddened eyes earned by hours of ploughing up and down the highly chlorinated school pool long before the rest of the student population is thinking more than _what’s for breakfast_. He’d come to class as Kim Jongin – popular, athletic, untouchable – but here, stumbling over this new, alien letter F, he is thrillingly waifish and exposed.

Jongin doesn’t notice him that day. He has to, though, in the following weeks, because if Jongin possesses the worst French accent in the class, Sehun has the best. His politician father was once an assistant to the Korean Ambassador to France and Sehun lived in Paris for the first three years of his life. By the time he makes it to high school French classes his vocabulary has dwindled to _oui_ and _non,_ but the music of the graceful French syllables still lingers at the tip of his tongue. His own French name, Victoire, stymies the rest of the class, but the difficult buzzing V flies eagerly from Sehun’s lips, and Mademoiselle soon finds in him her prize student.

Mademoiselle is a crusader for _le Français_. The most glamorous teacher at SM High, she is an elegant Aryan beauty, with flaming red hair always perfectly coiffed and skin the shade of moonbeams that a freckle would not dare to blemish. Sehun firmly believes she is the sole reason for the popularity of French among SM students. He suspects that all of the boys and at least half of the girls in his class have a serious crush on Mademoiselle. He wonders if Jongin, too, chose French to watch Mademoiselle stride gracefully in front of the class, expounding on irregular verbs, accompanied by the ever-present fluid gestures of those long, white hands.

Mademoiselle seems to view any failure in French as a national insult to her country. The class’s lack of fluency in _la Français_ is, to her, a serious ethnic degradation. She soon latches onto Jongin and Sehun as examples.

“Felix,” she demands of Jongin one morning, sashaying model-like before the whiteboard and pointing a manicured finger at the swimmer’s alarmed face. “ _Repetez-vous, sil’ vous plait: ma couleur pr_ é _fer_ éé _est le vert.”_

Jongin makes an honest attempt to state his preference for the colour green, but it comes off like a drunk saying the alphabet backwards.

“ _Non! Non!”_ Mademoiselle throws her hands into the air. “ _Écoutez -_ listen carefully – _ma – couloeur – pr_ é _fer_ éé _–"_ and hands on slender hips, she repeats the sentence at snail’s pace.

Jongin wrinkles his nose and tries again. The worry mark between his eyes deepens as he stumbles over the sounds, but the language once again proves elusive.

“ _Oh, lá lá,”_ laments Mademoiselle. “ _Mon pauvre petit,_ what are we to do? You ‘ave ze clumsy tongue. But per'aps my Victoire can say it right. Victoire, will you try?”

Sehun fears offending Jongin by succeeding where he has so publicly failed, but he cannot refuse a teacher’s request. He stands up and repeats the words with the touch of languid blurring that separates the good at French from the best. “My favourite colour is green,” he says in French, and darts a cautious glance at Jongin. It is never a good idea to show up a popular kid’s weaknesses, especially not in front of a whole class of watching students.

But instead of the evil eye, Jongin returns his glance with a shy, sweet smile, and that is the moment when Sehun falls. Hopelessly and heartbreakingly, he falls for Kim Jongin.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Sehun knows he is different. He tries to keep it hidden. Being different is not a good thing.

He is a year younger than the rest of his class, cursed by a brief flash of brilliance at age eight that had caused him to skip a year. He sometimes wonders if that age gap is the reason why he can’t seem to figure out why some kids are popular and some are not, but he suspects the extra year wouldn’t have made a difference. He just isn’t good at fitting in.

He tries. He eavesdrops on the popular kid’s conversations and stores up funny remarks, but they never come out when he wants them to. He studies fashion brands and popular groups, but he can’t figure out why Vans are more edgy than Converse, whether knitted vests are geek-chic or just plain dork, or what makes Suzy sexier than IU. He knows he will never have a chance to get into Jongin’s crowd.

With nobody else to turn to Sehun naturally gravitates towards the other loner in his class – the quiet, dreamy-eyed Chinese boy, Zhang Yixing, who does ballet and is therefore either ignored or ridiculed by the rest. In any other situation the two would never have noticed each other, but loners and losers must stick together. Yixing offers solidarity against the masses and Sehun accepts it with more gratitude than he would care to admit.

Yixing is good at French too. His years of dance have impregnated his mind with obscure ballet terms – _enchainment, entrechat, battement_ – and while not exactly useful in everyday conversation, they at least give him a vocabulary far greater than the average SM High second year.

But loner or not, Sehun knows Yixing is still one of them _._ In unison with every other boy in the class, he follows Mademoiselle’s _chasse-_ ing gait, eyes fixed on the sensuous sway of her hips. Every flick of her white hands is cause for a wistful sigh, every question directed to him eliciting a stammering, stuttering confusion as daydreams collide with reality. Sehun cannot fathom the dreams that glow in Zhang Yixing’s soft brown eyes.

He knows Mademoiselle is sexy, because all the boys say so, but it is a kind of knowing without personal experience. It’s like the way he knows the earth is round. Deprived of elementary school geography, he would have lived his whole life without having any reason to question the certainty that if he sailed far enough, he would come to the waterfall at the edge of the world and topple over it into endless falling oblivion. How indignant he had been, when his teacher had told his five-year-old self that the earth circled the sun, rather than the other way round. For weeks he had resisted the idea. It was ridiculous! It denied the truth he saw every day with his own eyes! But with enough repetition of the idea, he came to believe the facts being told him, without any practical experience of the matter. In the same way, he believes the other boys when they say Mademoiselle is _tres sexy_ , but cannot think of any way to prove it to himself.

He thinks it is rather like being blind – or perhaps, instead, like being able to see more than others. To see things that cannot be put into words, the same way he cannot explain to a blind man the difference between pink and green. Sehun walks the school in a parallel universe where things of beauty shine only for him.

He waits for every French lesson with as much anticipation as anyone else. Only for Sehun, the attraction of the language isn’t the beautiful, unreachable Mademoiselle.

It is the beautiful, unreachable Kim Jongin.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

_Vert._ Green. Jongin may not be able to pronounce the French word, but he certainly has no trouble pulling off the colour. Sehun sits on the wobbly bleachers that rise up beside the school swimming pool and watches Jongin warm up and stretch, clad in the sports tracksuit of SM High. Not many people can pull off that particular shade of not-quite-neon-green, especially with the purple trimming adding insult to injury. The SM school uniform is the source of much grief among its students, but (in Sehun’s eyes at least) nobody ever wore those colours better than Kim Jongin.

The air is warm and thick with chlorine. The noise and chatter of the watching students bounces and echoes around the high ceiling and ripples across the green pool water below. Sehun clutches his school flag tightly. Officially he is here to support SM’s swim team in a regatta against athletes from three other local high schools. In actual fact, Sehun doesn’t give a shit if SM High are the worst swim team on the face of the planet. He is here for one reason and one reason only - to see Kim Jongin race the 200-metre butterfly, clad in nothing but his not-quite-neon-green Speedos.

The butterfly strokers are called to the starting blocks and the crowd around Sehun erupts in cheers. Sehun can only watch, his heart in his mouth, as Jongin peels off his tracksuit top, revealing a smooth, sculpted chest and washboard abs. He feels heat flush through him as Jongin slips his pants down and kicks them casually aside, standing loose-limbed and languid in 182 centimetres of golden-skinned glory. The swimmer is easy and unselfconscious in his tiny slip of green lycra, the lack of body shyness surely a mark of years of competing in front of crowds in little more than his own skin. He jumps fluidly onto the starting block, all lean, tapered swimmer’s legs. Crouched over and poised, ready to dive, he is focused, dauntless perfection, and Sehun feels like he’s been given a lifetime’s worth of Christmas presents all at once.

The starting gun cracks and Jongin bursts from the block in a surge of animal power. He enters the water surrounded by splashes from the other lanes. Sehun leaps to his feet and waves his school flag frantically for the not-quite-neon-green cap in lane three. The swimmers plough up the water into churning froth. They turn – once, twice, a third, and then the final thrashing sprint to the end where judges with stopwatches are crouched at the end of each lane. Jongin’s green cap is ahead of the rest – all but one. A navy cap surges in the outlying sixth lane as they pass under the fifteen metre flags.

Sehun finally finds his voice and screams with the rest, waving his flag, willing the navy cap to slow down, get a cramp, swallow water, drown - anything – and then they touch, green and navy together. The rest touch seconds later, and everyone is buzzing and hollering to each other in confusion because nobody can tell who won.

“Did he win? Did Jongin win?” Sehun turns to ask the kid to his left. Then his mouth falls open, because the kid to his left has green hair. Sehun has never seen anyone outside of a K-pop group on TV with green hair, and in real life it’s staggeringly weird. The guy looks like he’s had a head-on collision with a bucket of chlorine. His glowing locks are the exact aqua-marine shade of the rippling pool waters below. His eyebrows are green too. He says something but Sehun can’t take it in. He’s too distracted by that hair and those eyebrows.

“Who the fuck dyes their eyebrows green?” he blurts out, and then wishes he hadn’t, because this kid may have green hair and green eyebrows, but he is taller and broader than Sehun, and those green eyebrows mark a pair of huge dark eyes that fix on his face in stony un-amusement.

“Sorry,” he says hurriedly. “Forget I said that. I have a habit of blurting out the first words that come into my head. My tongue needs a ctrl+Z function.” He stabs his finger repetitively at his head. “Undo! Undo!”

The green-haired guy just raises one lazy green eyebrow at him and turns back to the pool. Sehun follows his gaze. The judges are comparing stopwatches. Sehun’s eyes latch onto Jongin as he pulls himself out of the water, and fixate on shoulders and biceps flexing, tanned skin glistening wet. Sehun only just manages to stop himself from fanning his face with both hands - what a dead giveaway that would be. He tears his eyes away from the visual feast with great reluctance and turns back to his neighbour.

“So why’d you choose green? School spirit or something?”

“No particular reason,” the guy says. He stares intensely at Sehun's face as he speaks, and Sehun blinks, disconcerted by being looked at like he’s a biology specimen about to be pinned to a card. Nobody just decides to dye their hair bright green for no reason, and Sehun opens his mouth to say so, but suddenly the stands around them are roaring again. The navy-capped boy of the rival school has his arms raised high in victory, and Jongin’s shoulders slump just a little before he's smiling and shaking the hand of the winner. Sehun has a sudden urge to leap down from the stands and do something very violent to the winning boy who dared to cause even an iota of dejection for Jongin.

“Fuck,” he says miserably. “We lost.”

“Second place isn’t so bad,” the green-haired boy says mildly. He bends down and drags a huge, black rectangular case out from under the bleachers beneath them. Sehun's jaw drops. It looks like a sniper rifle case from an action movie.

"What's that?"

“It’s a bass,” the green-haired boy tells him. “A bass guitar.” 

Sehun's brain makes the Windows shut-down noise. He sits there, staring into empty space until he reboots. Then he jumps to his feet. He fights his way through what seems like thousands of milling students and follows the distant green hair out into the sunlight, where he takes a grateful breath of non-chlorinated air. How can Jongin bear spending so much time submerged in the chemical? No wonder his eyes are always red.

The green-haired boy is already well ahead of him, huge black case weighing down one hand, long legs eating up the ground as he strides back towards the main school building. Sehun runs to catch up.

“Hey! Dude! You with the green hair!”

The green-haired boy ignores his voice. Undeterred, Sehun puts on a spurt of speed and skids to a stop in front of the taller boy, making him pull up with a surprised jerk. He looks down at Sehun with narrowed eyes.

“Sorry for calling you so rudely, but I don’t know your name,” Sehun says. He offers his hand. “I’m Oh Sehun, second year.”

The boy hesitates, then shifts his bass case to his other arm. He grips Sehun’s hand, and Sehun feels the hard, calloused fingertips that are earned only by long hours of pressing repetitively down on heavy steel strings.

“Park Chanyeol. Third year.” Now that they're outside the noisy pool hall, Sehun hears that Chanyeol's voice is a deep, rich baritone, like smooth dark molasses. Like the sound of the earth spinning.

“Nice to meet you, Park Chanyeol,” Sehun says, and sends Chanyeol his best and brightest smile. “Want to be in a band?”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

“Are you crazy?” Yixing looks from Sehun, to the poster, and back to Sehun again. He gestures at the poster, and even that frustrated movement is full of fluid, unconscious grace.

“It’s not a crazy idea,” Sehun protests. “StarQuest is open to all high school bands in the country. Why shouldn’t we enter?”

Yixing sighs. “Don’t you know that Daebak is entering? They’re our official school band and they’re all in the music program. What chance would we ever have against them, let alone all the other bands out there? We’re just regular students, and besides, we don’t even have a band.”

“Not _yet_ ,” Sehun says. He grabs Yixing’s arm. “Come on, Xing. Daebak may think they’re awesome and they may have managed to convince the rest of the student body too, but they’re really nothing all that special. I can sing and you can play keyboard, and I already got us a bass player. We only need a drummer and a lead guitarist and we’re sorted.”

Yixing snorts. “Even if we scrape a band together, there is no way anyone in this school is going to support us over Daebak. They’re super popular. We’re nobodies. They'll hate us.”

“You never know till you try,” Sehun says. “Come on, it’ll be fun. This could be our change to _be_ something, Xing. All the top agencies and music labels watch StarQuest. Imagine if we got scouted and signed. We'd be famous!”

“In your dreams,” Yixing says, but Sehun can tell he is wavering.

“Come on,” he pleads. “It won't hurt to try. We'll never know what might have been if we don't."

Yixing sighs. “Who plays bass?”

“Park Chanyeol, he’s the one with green hair. I don’t know how he gets away with it. Can you imagine what would happen if we came to school with hair like that? Must be nice, being a senior. Anyway, he’s agreed to play bass for us. We can’t let this opportunity slide.”

“Alright, fine. If you really want to, I’ll give it a go."

"Yes!" Sehun cheers and grabs Yixing in a quick hug of celebration, before remembering they're in the school entrance hall, where anyone could see them and draw conclusions. For his own part he wouldn't care, but Yixing struggles more, and already has enough homophobic slurs tossed his way for doing ballet. He steps back hurriedly. Yixing doesn't react at all.

"Don't get too excited yet," he says. "We still need to find a guitarist and a drummer.”

Sehun considers this, then brightens. “Didn’t you tell me you used to be friends with Byun Baekhyun? I’ve seen him carry a guitar case. Why don’t you ask him?”

Yixing frowns. “That was a long time ago, Sehun. He’s changed a lot since primary school. He won’t want to talk to me.”

“You never know until you try,” Sehun tells him. “I think Baekhyun's crowd hangs out behind the cafeteria. Let’s go ask.”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

There are about eight boys lounging against the sun-warmed concrete wall where the back of the cafeteria leaves a narrow alley between the neighbouring building. It’s not quite out of bounds, but not quite inside either. In this strange piece of concrete no-man’s-land, the troublemakers of SM High hide out from the teachers to cut class, smoke, and commit other, probably less-than-legal acts. Sehun knows this place exists but he hasn’t actually been here before. Normally he wouldn’t dream of stepping foot behind the cafeteria – these boys are _scary_ – but his desire for fame and glory outweighs his common sense. He stands uncertainly at the entrance of the alley and wishes Yixing would stand beside him instead of trying to hide behind him. He waits to be noticed. Certainly stepping foot onto this hallowed ground without an invite is asking for trouble.

Three or four of the boys are smoking cigarettes, and the rest are lounging among the wreathing smoke, sitting or leaning against the sun-drenched wall. Sehun searches their faces until he finds Byun Baekhyun. Yixing’s old schoolmate is inking an elaborate design in black permanent marker onto another boy’s forearm. His hair is a shock of black spikes and several rings pierce his ears. He's customized his uniform - the green and purple plaid hems of his white shirt have been ripped out, and the garment hangs open over a black t-shirt. His tie is carelessly flung around his neck instead of properly knotted. Sehun watches as Baekhyun concentrates on the artwork he is inking on the other boy’s skin, and thinks that with his long-lashed brown eyes and delicate features, Byun Baekhyun is prettier than any of the girls in the school.

“What’re you freaks doing here?”

One of the smokers has noticed them. Sehun clears his throat, nerves heightening as almost every pair of eyes in the alley turns and fixes on them.

“We want to talk to Baekhyun,” he says. His voice comes out half a pitch higher than usual.

“I’m busy. Get lost.” Baekhyun’s light voice doesn’t seem to hold any venom, but he doesn’t look up from his permanent-marker tattoo either.

“You heard him,” the smoker says, and takes a threatening step forwards when Sehun hesitates. “Fuck off.”

Sehun elbows Yixing in the ribs. “Say something,” he hisses.

Yixing steps up to stand beside Sehun. “Baekhyun,” he says in his gentle voice, and now Baekhyun looks up, lips parting, eyes going wide before they shutter, blocking all visible emotion from his face. “Please?”

Sehun winces – pleading is not going to raise their abysmal street cred at all – but to his surprise it seems to work. Baekhyun looks up at the sky, then stands and shoves the marker in his pocket.

“I’ll finish it later,” he tells his surprised friend, and follows Sehun and Yixing out of the alley.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

They practice. They still don’t have a drummer, but StarQuest is less than a month away and they need to prepare two contrasting songs. Sehun is nervous in front of Baekhyun. He’s shorter than Sehun and maybe even skinnier, which is saying a lot, and he has beautiful, delicate hands to match his beautiful, delicate face, but Baekhyun possesses an acid tongue that can spit off the harshest remarks in such a mild tone that you don’t even realise he’s insulting you until you’ve already accepted the words. But they need him, because Baekhyun is not only a talented guitarist, but he can also write music. He has written them a rock song and a ballad, and both of them are shockingly good.

Sehun wonders why Baekhyun isn’t in the specialist music program, but he's afraid to ask. Baekhyun never smiles, even when his thin fingers fly deftly over the six strings of his electric guitar as if he was born to rock. He seems tense, wound like a tightly coiled spring, and Sehun fears that even the slightest touch will make him snap. Everyone is cautious around Baekhyun, but they can tell that with his sharp ears and sharper criticism, their music is improving exponentially.

They make Baekhyun the band leader and look for a drummer. It is hard. None of the kids in the music program will dare to challenge the popular reigning stars of the school band Daebak _._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

A week into their practices, Kim Jongin hooks up with Jung Soojung. Everyone in the school is talking about it. Sehun’s heart drops straight into his Converse sneakers and stays there, miserable and hating the world. Everywhere he turns he seems to see Jongin and Soojung, arm in arm in the corridor, feeding each other French fries in the cafeteria, and once, traumatizingly, pushed up against the lockers, lips pressed together, hands crawling over each other in passionate embrace. Sehun is devastated and envious and turned on all at once. Rumour has it that Jongin and Soojung have gone to third base. Sehun keeps imagining them doing it, then gets so worked up that he cannot finish, then finishes anyway, pretending he is Soojung.

At band practice, Sehun sings the ballad Baekhyun composed of heartbreak and longing, and for once Baekhyun doesn’t have anything to say about lack of emotion.

He tries to stop thinking about Jongin, but he might as well try and stop the earth from turning.

French class is torture. Jongin sits at the very next desk, his hair in ruffled white-gold perfection, shirt sleeves rolled up to mid-bicep, revealing strong tendons and delicate tracings of blue veins and a tantalising glimpse of the soft, pale skin in the crook of his elbow.

Mademoiselle continues her French crusade. As beginners they are confined to the declarative: _I am, I go, I say, I do._ But Mademoiselle hints at tricks they’ll later learn. “It’s really the subjunctive,” she says once, then shakes her head and simplifies it.

The word subjunctive goads Sehun’s curiosity. He stays behind to ask Mademoiselle what it means, and, gratified by his interest, she explains. She reveals the tense of contingency, of _que,_ of _what if?_ In French, she says, verbs take different forms when referring to fantasy. She teaches him key words _\- desirer, vouloir, souhaiter -_ plaintive, mournful cries of longing.

While the rest of the class tackles the simple future, Sehun fills his notebook with a more advanced endeavour: _If I were to hold Jongin, to kiss him, to tell him he were mine…_

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The world wakes to the news that terrorists have bombed a street in Paris, killing hundreds. Sehun’s father discusses the political ramifications of the attacks over breakfast. His mother watches the news and cries. Sehun finds it hard to eat. His heart hurts for the Parisians, for the thousands who have lost someone, for the dead. He was born there, after all. He is connected to the country whether he remembers it or not.

At school everyone is talking about Jongin and Soojung breaking up, only two weeks after getting together. Kids trade notes for the afternoon geography test and giggle over stupid videos on their phones. Sehun stumbles through the day in a daze. How can they all act so normal? Don’t they know that people’s worlds have ended?

In French class, Mademoiselle is slumped over her desk. Her perfect hair is falling down in clumps and there are blotches of mascara around her eyes.

“I’m sure you’ve heard,” she begins, almost inaudible. She presses her hand over her heart. “Forgive me,” she says, “today I can’t –" and sobs consume the rest.

She weeps and weeps, beyond the point of shame. Sehun has never seen a teacher cry before. Neither has the rest of the class. They sit in horrified silence, unable to move. Nobody knows what to do.

“ _Mes fréres,_ ” she cries, _“mes soeurs._ Gone...lost...”

Sehun turns to look at Jongin. Backlit by the sun, he seems to glow with a golden aura, white light glinting through his hair. His eyes are red-rimmed and glimmering. Is it the ever-present irritation of chlorine? Could it be grief? Is it because of his breakup with Soojung or sympathy with the French disaster?

Sehun does not know.

Jongin puts his index fingers on the edge of the desk and begins tapping out a quiet yet complex rhythm. Sehun’s eyes become fixed on Jongin’s strong fingers as they dance on the edge of his desk amidst a background of heartbroken weeping. They carry Sehun away from the pain. He sees the pattern of the rhythm, hears the faint percussion of finger onto wood. The rhythm seems to beat in time with his heart, but try as he might, he cannot guess the tune.

Finally, one of the girls plucks up the courage to go for the principal, and they are given the rest of the period off. Sehun follows Jongin amidst the crowd. He grabs for Jongin’s arm and the swimmer swings around. His eyes crease slightly as he looks at Sehun. A smile? A frown?

“Kim Jongin,” Sehun gasps. The contact of the palm of his hand on Jongin’s wrist is sending little shockwaves of electricity all through his body. “Are you a drummer?”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

With the addition of Jongin’s drums to their group, Baekhyun’s songs blossom, like a barren winter garden that had not been dead at all, only waiting for the arrival of the first breath of spring to burst into life. There are two weeks left till StarQuest.

They begin to practice out of school hours, picking Jongin’s house for the simple reason that the drum kit is the most difficult instrument to transport. Sehun is the first to arrive, accidentally-on-purpose twenty minutes too early – bonus minutes calculated to be alone with Jongin.

Jongin’s house sits off-kilter on its lot, as though it has been wide-trucked and simply dumped there. It is surrounded by unkempt, scraggly bushes and neglected yellowish lawn. The neighbours must think it an eyesore. They must be driven crazy by Jongin practicing his drums in the shed out the back.

Sehun follows Jongin around with the edgy thrill of a tourist. Jongin’s house is in shocking opposition of his own. The furniture is old and undusted and doesn’t match the curtains. The floors are bare boards instead of carpet. The walls have posters and photographs tacked to ancient, peeling wallpaper. There are no books. Sehun studies the photographs pinned to the wall and learns precious snippets of information about Jongin’s family: his father is a taxi driver; he has his mother's smile; he has two older sisters, both away at university.

The other three arrive together and they set up in the shed, plug in Yixing’s keyboard, amp up Chanyeol’s bass and Baekhyun’s electric guitar. Sehun is the only one without an instrument to hide behind. His voice is like his soul, and it will soon be exposed before the world. The idea of singing in front of hundreds of people sends shivers down his limbs and into his fingers and toes. When they look at him, what will they see?

The ballad is perfect now. The rock song still lacks that certain spark that will kindle it into flame. Baekhyun frowns and kicks the floor, stirring up a small cloud of dust. He tells Chanyeol to sing the chorus too, a baritone line an octave below Sehun’s. It will add depth to the vocals, he says. It will bring the melody to life.

Chanyeol refuses.

Everyone stops fiddling with their instrument to stare in apprehension at the leader and the bassist. Nobody has refused Baekhyun’s command before.

The bassist’s eyes are distant. He slides his finger along the thick E string of his bass, causing a deep, metallic scrape to resonate around the shed. “No,” he says quietly. “I don’t sing.”

Baekhyun crosses thin arms and scowls furiously. He seems to vibrate with tension, like the taut plucked strings of his own electric guitar.

“What do you mean, you don’t sing? Everyone sings. You’re the only person here with a deep enough voice. Just do it!”

“No,” Chanyeol repeats. His voice is still calm, but Sehun detects a flash of something in Chanyeol’s eyes, some deep emotion he has not seen there before. Chanyeol stands taller and broader than any of them, but he seems suddenly vulnerable, almost childlike as his shoulders hunch over his bass guitar.

Baekhyun curses. The words slice jagged tears through the air. “I need a baritone for this part, it won’t be right otherwise. It won’t - you don’t understand! It has to be this way!”

Behind his keyboard, Yixing shifts as if to move forwards, but thinks better of it and drops his head. He traces a graceful finger along the keys, dancing too lightly to sound the notes.

“Why does it have to be this way?” Chanyeol asks. He’s always so quiet that it’s strange to hear him speak. “It’s just a couple of lines. It won’t ruin the song.”

“Yes it will!” Baekhyun cries. His beautiful face is distorted, twisted with anger. He takes off his guitar and slams it aside with a crash of jangled strings. The amp feedbacks in an ear-splitting shriek, and everyone except Chanyeol winces.

“Baekhyun, I…” Chanyeol starts, but trails off as Baekhyun turns and storms out of the shed. In his wake the air is thick with the bitter taste of ache and anger. Yixing finally makes up his mind and hurries out after Baekhyun. Chanyeol leans against the wall and lowers his green head, turns the pegs of his bass guitar, tunes and retunes methodically. The quick jerk down in pitch, followed by the slow and careful raise, tautening the string back up until the note sings true. And then he does it again. Over and over and over.

Sehun glances at Jongin. Their eyes meet and lock. Sehun can feel his dreams crashing down around him like castles built on sand. Every member of their nameless band is so important, and Baekhyun is their leader, their songwriter, the most talented of them all. Without Baekhyun, they have nothing.

“It’s okay,” he says to Chanyeol, although his heart has sunk right into his shoes. “You don’t have to sing if you don’t want to. Baekhyun was out of line. I don’t see why he has to get so mad about such a little thing.”

Chanyeol doesn’t look up from the strings of his bass. His dark eyes are deep, features impassive. For all the notice he takes of Sehun, he might as well have not even heard him.

Sehun sighs and glances out of the open door, where Baekhyun and Yixing are crouched down among the overgrown grass of the back yard. Their backs are to the door. Yixing’s arm is around Baekhyun, and Baekhyun’s shoulders are shaking.

“Let’s take a break,” Sehun says.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Jongin follows him out. They avoid Baekhyun and Yixing. Their heads are together now, and Sehun hopes that their old friendship will salvage the situation. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with Baekhyun, but it’s clearly something far greater than Chanyeol's refusal to sing.

They go behind the shed, giving the other two some space. Sehun sits down on the ground among the scrubby weeds. He leans his back against the shed wall and sighs up at the grey winter sky. He kicks at a stinging nettle, flattening it into the ground with the sole of his Converse, and then feels sorry he has done so. Like himself, the weed was only dreaming of reaching the sky, and now he has broken its spine and crushed it into the dirt.

Then Jongin sits down beside him, and every thought of the band and its troubles is instantly wiped from Sehun’s mind. He is overwhelmed by the sheer physical proximity of Jongin to himself.

“So why’d you break up with Soojung?” he blurts out, and immediately winces. The curse of his filter-less tongue again. “Sorry. That was an asshole thing to ask. I’m always speaking without thinking.”

“It’s okay,” Jongin says. Sehun thinks that will be all, but to his surprise, after a few moments Jongin answers his question.

“She wanted everything. She was pushing too fast and too hard, and I didn't feel the same about her.” He sighs, tilts his head back against the shed wall and closes his eyes. “I didn't feel anything with her, Sehun.”

Sehun's eyes linger on Jongin’s thick lashes as they rest against his cheeks. Slowly, tentatively, he reaches out and places his hand over the back of Jongin’s.

Jongin’s eyes open, but he does not pull away.

Sehun’s heart races.

“Do you feel anything?” he whispers, swallows, breathes.

Silence.

“Do you think you could ever feel something...with me?”

Jongin doesn’t answer, but his hand is hot under Sehun’s, and he still does not pull away. Sehun feels a thrill run through him, buoying up like a great golden bubble inside his chest. He strokes back of Jongin’s hand with his thumb, tracing the bones, the knuckles, the raised, athlete’s veins. And Jongin does not pull away.

His hand grows bolder, exploring Jongin’s jawline, the place his ear meets the edge of his jaw, the delicate hollow at his temple. He leans closer until their bodies are pressed together, creating a warmth between them that banishes the winter chill, and tastes the sweetness of Jongin’s clouding breath.

And Jongin does not pull away.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

“We need a name.”

They are back in the shed, instruments set aside for now. Sehun perches on top of the electric guitar amp and looks around at the band members sprawled around the shed. Baekhyun has been persuaded inside and is sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against the bass drum. His face is paler than ever, but the ever-present tension in his limbs seems to have eased, at least for now. Yixing sits beside him, and his face is dreamy, distant as usual. Chanyeol leans against the wall beside the keyboard, and Jongin sits on the bass amp next to Sehun and props his chin in his hand.

“As long as it’s not something as pretentious as Daebak,"Jongin says, and Sehun grins.

They toss ideas left and right. Baekhyun is silent at first, but begins to join in after a while. Sehun is even grateful for the scathing way his ideas are shot down by him. Baekhyun’s cutting comments are what separates them from the merely average and propels them towards the great.

“We learned about something in social studies,” Jongin says after a while. “When people have been downtrodden for too long, like by a bad government or something, they break all the rules and come together, and then they’re strong enough to rise up and overcome it. I can’t remember the proper word for it,” he looks down, shy at having all their attention on him, “but it kind of sounds like us. Don’t you think?”

“A rebellion,” Baekhyun says slowly. “A revolution. An uprising.”

“Uprising,” Yixing repeats.

“I like it,” Chanyeol’s deep voice speaks quietly from the corner.

“Me too.” Jongin nods.

“Uprising,” Sehun repeats. He smiles and turns to Jongin, holding up a hand to high-five, but instead of slapping his palm, Jongin grips his hand, interlacing their fingers. Sehun’s palm tingles, and they share a secret smile.


	2. Yixing

Zhang Yixing is in love with Mademoiselle’s hands.

His eyes follow the French teacher’s gestures as she attempts to explain some concept to a sea of blank faces. They are long and strong and slender; musician’s hands; dancer’s hands. They are as white as any hands Yixing has ever seen, and when their rapid, graceful movement places them through the shafts of sunlight falling through the classroom window, they seem to catch and throw off beams of light like sun striking a mirror.

Yixing imagines dancing a _pas de deux_ with a partner who possesses such hands. How they would flutter bird-like, float, glide, convey each emotion right down to the scarlet-painted fingernails. How they would caress the light, rest gently on the still air, then stir it into sparkling wind. How together, they would be lifted, and soar beyond the ordinary, everyday world into a place of dreams.

“ _Estelle? Estelle!”_

The sound of his French name makes Yixing startle. Mademoiselle is standing over him, arms folded, a sarcastic expression hovering about her lips as her green eyes glare down at him.

“Uh, y-yes – I mean – _oui?_ ” Jolted into harsh reality, he stumbles over his words, and cringes inside as he hears the class snicker. Mademoiselle’s fingers tap in fluid impatience against her arm.

“ _Mon dieu._ ” Her eyes roll to the sky. “Zis school is full of idiots. _Estelle_ _, mon petit rêveur,_ do you wish to pass zis class?”

“Ye - _oui,_ Mademoiselle _._ ” Yixing feels his face begin to flush at the mention of his grades. He knows he is not doing well in French. How can he focus on irregular verbs when he is confronted daily with hands of such exquisiteness?

“Zen _pay attention!_ ” She snaps an enameled fingernail against his forehead, and Yixing yelps at the shock of pain. Sniggers from his classmates scratch around the edges of the classroom, rasping at him.

Mademoiselle sashays back to the front of the class. Yixing blinks, several times, and rubs his smarting forehead. He lowers his head to his textbook and in doing so, misses the sympathetic glance shot his way from Sehun. He must focus. He makes a promise to himself not to look at Mademoiselle’s hands even once more until class is over.

“Freak,” someone hisses behind him.

Yixing pretends not to hear, but the word stings more than his reddening forehead. He tries to ignore it, but it squirms its way over his skin like a crawling cockroach and finds its way inexorably into his heart, where it settles, malevolent, black and hurtful, among the rest.

_Freak._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

“Xing? Are you okay?”

It is Sehun. Only Sehun calls him by his nickname, these days. Only Sehun would care enough to ask. Yixing forces a smile onto his lips. He’s practiced it often enough in the mirror that he knows the dimple in his cheek and the curve of his eyes would convince most people that he is cheerful, light-hearted, maybe even happy. That sticks and stones may break his bones, but words will never hurt him.

“I'm fine,” he says, focusing on opening his locker and selecting the right books for the next class. He takes out a math textbook and then, after a moment’s hesitation, a sheaf of sheet music, and stuffs both into his backpack. When he slams the locker door closed and turns, he finds Sehun still watching him. Yixing knows Sehun isn’t fooled, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. He and Sehun may be friends, but it is a bond of convenience, of protection against the masses. He does not want to deepen it by talking about such things as feelings. He does not want to risk the pain when Sehun eventually, inevitably, turns away.

“What did she call me?” he asks.

“Huh?”

“Mademoiselle. She called me something in French. _Mon petit_ – something.”

“Ah.” Sehun’s eyes flick up and to the left, remembering. “ _Mon petit rêveur_.”

Yixing wonders at the way the French sounds flow from Sehun’s lips. He sounds different to all the others when they pronounce French words. Yixing can’t quite understand it, but there is something real about the way Sehun speaks French – something authentic. A soft, swift blurring, the elongated vowels wrapping themselves around his tongue like a cat lapping at cream. Even his ballet teacher doesn’t speak French like this.

“Yeah, that. What does it mean?”

He hopes it isn’t anything bad. He has enough to deal with from his fellow students without insults directed his way from teachers as well.

But Sehun smiles.

“It means dreamer,” he says. “ _Mon petit rêveur._ My little dreamer.”

They walk towards math class together. Yixing keeps his eyes lowered, hunches his shoulders, making himself smaller. The hallways are dangerous and it is better to try and pass through them unnoticed. _Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words scar me forever._ But Sehun is at his side, and so they pass the hallways safely.

Yixing’s heart is scarred in patterns of hateful words, and the only way to protect himself from further hurt is to close himself off. He has no friends because he cannot trust them not to turn on him, not to betray him in the end. He learned that lesson the hard way. Everyone he has ever loved has abandoned and forgotten him.

He doesn’t exactly blame them. There isn’t much about him that would interest anyone for long. But still, Yixing dreams of being loved.

He looks up at Sehun and wonders if the younger boy might want a deeper friendship. Sehun’s face is fierce as he marches through the hallway, scowling at anyone who glances their way, every sharp edge of his body radiating _don’t mess with me_ vibes. Sehun could survive the halls on his own, and yet he always waits for Yixing, who certainly cannot.

Yixing wonders if one day, perhaps, he will be able to trust Sehun.

 _Rêveur_. Dreamer. A tiny smile, too small to curve his lips, puts the dimple in his cheek.

He has been called far worse things in his life.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The keys of the grand piano array themselves in perfect order beneath Yixing’s fingertips, groups of three and two, black and white octaves waiting to be struck into life. They are consistent in their pattern, always predictable, always singing out the same note no matter who strikes them. They are the one thing in Yixing’s life that he can trust. They are the one thing that will never change.

The piano is old - old enough that the keys are real, yellowed ivory rather than the hard white plastic of more modern instruments. Yixing traces his fingers over the slight hollow that runs down the middle of the keys, worn away by generations of fingers repeatedly stroking the ivory. He imagines the long-dead elephant whose tusks were ripped from its bloodied corpse to create music for humans. Without his conscious intention, all ten of his fingers jump and strike a sudden, crashing chord. The cry of the elephant resonates around the empty dance studio and fades slowly into ringing silence.

Yixing rests gentle fingers on silent ivory, eyes distant and dreamy. For once, he is not carried away classical concertos, by Liszt’s rapid-fire, bell-like octaves, Debussy’s thundering majesty, or Mozart's breathless angels. Nor is he consumed by his more recent obsession with Mademoiselle’s hands. He is thinking of Sehun’s excited words, spoken in the hallway before the noticeboard.

Yixing doesn’t know if he wants to be in a rock band, but he agreed with Sehun for the sake of peace – Sehun never gives up until he gets his own way. Now he wonders if perhaps the younger boy is right. Trying something he would never have dreamed of doing on his own – perhaps it will be Yixing's salvation.

It has become increasingly, painfully obvious to Yixing that he doesn’t have the kind of talent he's always dreamed of. His ballet is good – it has to be, after practicing for so long – but it is not the best. His feet will never have the high arch prized among dancers, no matter how many times he presses them over his foot stretcher, forcing his soles to bend over the sharply curved wood, pulling his toes down with a wide fabric strap until his eyes tear up with the pain of it. His tendons are not naturally flexible, his turn-out never quite good enough. The torn muscle in his side has never been quite the same as it was before he'd injured it. He might, if he is lucky, be accepted into the _corps_ of a professional company simply because there are so many less men than women in the ballet world, but that is not what he wants. He needs to shine, to be noticed, and he cannot even meet his own standards, let alone those of a soloist.

Likewise, his piano is good, but he does not have that special something that will carry him towards virtuoso level. He doesn’t want to be merely a good pianist, a good accompanist, always in the background, never noticed. He wants people to look at him. He wants to be seen, to be heard. His heart is hollow and desperate with the need for love.

 _You never know till you try,_ says Sehun's voice in his head.

Yixing’s despair has found something to catch onto and pull him towards the light.

 _This could be our chance to_ be _something, Xing._

Rock music has never been Yixing’s _forte_ , but there is one thing he knows for sure – rock music is cool. Rock stars are admired, upheld, worshipped by fans. Rock stars are loved by thousands. Millions.

If Yixing made it as a rock star, then maybe, just maybe, people would love him too.

The silence is broken by the laughing chatter of an approaching class. Yixing sits silent and unnoticed at the piano as thirteen or fourteen little girls pour into the dance studio. Its empty mirrored space is filled with their noise and excitement as they pull on their pink ballet shoes and tuck the broad satin ribbons in careful crosses over their ankles. He gazes blankly at the shelf of the piano in front of him. There is no sheet music there. Yixing doesn’t need it. His distant eyes dream of crowds, of cheers, of thousands screaming his name.

When the ballet teacher arrives and the little girls flock to the _barre_ and arrange supple bodies into first position, he strikes up a rhythmic polka without needing to be told. He follows their exercises through the corner of his eye, pausing when the teacher stops to adjust a finger here, lift a chin there, continuing fluidly when the exercises restart. He entertains himself by adding little touches and flourishes of his own to the repetitive music, improvising around the basic rhythms. When the girls move on to centre work he follows their steps with his music, matching their movements even when they stumble or falter, carrying them deftly through their simple _enchainements._

Nobody pays him any attention. Nobody sees him. He is, after all, nothing more than a very well-trained CD player, existing only for the purpose of providing the perfect music for the class, and the class of slightly older girls that follows, and the one after that. The job of accompanying the ballet classes pays for his own lessons. He is well used to being invisible. But his soft brown eyes gaze into the empty space where the sheet music would go if he needed such things, and he dreams.

One day, he will be noticed. One day, nobody will call him _freak_. One day, he will be loved.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Sehun’s stubbornness has put Yixing in a position he had never dared to dream he would be in again, and that is in the same room with Byun Baekhyun.

The tension in the air is palpable. He could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Sehun jitters around the room, trying to help but being more of a hindrance as Park Chanyeol plugs his instrument into the amplifier, then skittering over to Baekhyun and producing an electronic tuner to help him get the six metal strings of his electric guitar in tune.

Yixing swallows as Baekhyun scoffs at the tuner, knocking Sehun’s eager hand away. He can tune his guitar to pitch perfection without electronic aid. Yixing worries that Sehun will be hurt by Baekhyun’s acidic tone, but Sehun, it seems, is tougher than Yixing gives him credit for. He shrugs, tosses the tuner aside.

“Baekhyun’s written us some songs,” he announces to the room in general. He picks up a pile of music and begins distributing pages to Chanyeol and Yixing. Yixing takes his sheets and looks at them. The music has been handwritten on blank manuscript paper. He recognizes Baekhyun’s messy handwriting in the scrawl of lyrics below the music. The sight of that familiar scrawl makes something twist inside his chest. He glances away from the words – although he is curious, they are not his first priority – and examines the musical notes. Baekhyun has drawn them as brief black strokes above and between the stave lines instead of regular filled circles, and Yixing can see the urgent speed with which his once-best-friend has dashed out the lines of music. As if he is in some kind of race against himself, and the notes must be torn out of his soul before they drive him insane.

The music will not be easy to follow, written this way, but Yixing is up for the challenge. He wants to find out what Baekhyun has created. He wants to know if, somehow, through this expression of Baekhyun’s hidden self, he will be able to know his old friend again.

The song starts with a piano solo, high on a double treble clef, the left hand dancing over semi-quavers, melancholic broken chords. Yixing’s fingers twitch as tones sing in his head.

Chanyeol squints at the scribbled music and strikes a few deep, resonant notes on his bass guitar. Sehun is mouthing lyrics to himself. Yixing glances over at Baekhyun. He is all angles as he slouches against the wall; pointed elbows, bony shoulders, jaw so sharp it's almost hollow beneath. The wide embroidered strap of his electric guitar pulls the neck of his t-shirt down slightly, revealing a glimpse of collarbone jutting under pale skin. His eyes are as sharp as his jawline, glinting as he watches the others inspect the music.

“Have you got it?” Baekhyun’s voice is sharp too, like shattered glass. His eyes flick up and meet Yixing’s, and Yixing hastily looks away.

“I think so,” Sehun says, and Chanyeol nods. Yixing arranges the handwritten pages on the stand of the keyboard and adds his own agreement.

Yixing starts to play. The notes run from his fingers and amaze him. Sight-reading, he does not fully know what the music will sound like before he strikes the notes, and the unexpectedly wistful beauty that sings from beneath his fingertips raises goosebumps along his arms. He cannot glance up from the music to look at Baekhyun, but he feels the essence of his friend in the music, and his heart yearns to reach out to Baekhyun, to pull away the layers of anger and hurt and sorrow, to find the boy he’d once known hiding deep inside.

After a couple of measures Chanyeol’s bass comes in, striking deep under the high notes rippling from Yixing’s hands, and then Sehun begins to chant the first lyrics. They get about thirty seconds into the song before Baekhyun jerks himself away from the wall.

“Stop,” he says, and the music dies away as everyone stills and looks at the lead guitarist. Baekhyun is scowling.

“Chanyeol, you’re behind. You’re dragging the pace. Keep up with Yixing. Sehun, do you call that singing? I wrote the melody for a reason.”

“Sorry,” Sehun mumbles. “I’m not that great at sight-reading. I’ll get it next–"

“I don't want excuses,” Baekhyun snaps. “Do it again.”

They do it again. And again. Baekhyun makes adjustments to Yixing’s part, adding notes in rapid dashes to the right hand line. He seems to know instinctively which notes will harmonise to best enhance the melody. Yixing is stunned. He had no idea Baekhyun could do this kind of thing.

He plays, and the few times he is able to get through more than a couple of measures without Baekhyun stopping them to correct something, the music calls him like the cry of a lonely child, and with it comes an awareness of something darker, a pain of his own which might be sung out of the shadows.

“We need drums,” Baekhyun mutters fretfully. He strikes his hand across his guitar in a frustrated crash of strings. “The pace is dragging. It’s not right without a rhythm.” He glares at Sehun. “Why don’t we have a drummer?”

“I’m trying to find one,” Sehun hedges. “They’re all so caught up with the music program –"

“I don’t care what they’re doing,” Baekhyun says. “Get one, or this isn’t going to work. I’m not going to fuck around with only half a band.”

“Okay,” Sehun says hurriedly. “I’ll get us a drummer. I will.”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Yixing watches his own fingers dance across the keyboard and thinks that songs often touch people in a way nothing else can, enhancing every mood they invoke, teasing out every subtlety of pain and happiness. Even when the words to songs are foolish or empty, they still have power. And Baekhyun’s words are far from foolish and empty.

Sehun sings their ballad. His voice is different today, Yixing thinks. His eyes are shadowed. Haunted. It is the first time Sehun has really put emotion into the words, and the first time Yixing wonders if Sehun might have the ability to be not just an okay singer, but a good one.

Has something happened? He watches Sehun and wonders if he is brave enough to ask.

 _The people of the world have turned their backs on me,_ Sehun sings.

_They watch me with split faces, twisting eyes_

_And now I see that you've become the same_

_You look at me with shame; that's my greatest pain._

It is Sehun singing, but the words belong to Baekhyun. Yixing wonders how it is possible that Baekhyun’s words could echo his own innermost feelings so closely.

The later section of the song changes pace, becomes softer, quietly pleading. _Don't go, don't go, don't leave…_ Sehun’s plaintive cry seems to catch at Yixing’s heart.

 _Don't leave me,_ Baekhyun calls through Sehun, as if from the depths of a dark abyss. _If you, too, leave me, I will die..._

“There is some music I’m hearing,” he murmurs into the next silence.

“Jeez, I hope so.” Baekhyun’s voice is sarcastic.

“No, I mean...there's something inside the other lines. It’s interesting. See in this first section? The thread is subtly opposing the main harmony…” he trails off, because he can see the expression on Baekhyun’s face. 

“Can we get on with it?” Baekhyun scratches a harsh chord out of his guitar.

“Baekhyun, can’t we highlight the brighter theme coming in for just a moment here?” Yixing tries desperately not to mind how angry Baekhyun looks. “We could enhance it. It’s getting lost.”

“Go ahead, since you know so fucking much,” Baekhyun snarls. Yixing stops himself from visibly flinching, but the hurt sinks in anyway, as though his flesh was nothing but smoke, to scribe the words upon his bones. All the same, through Baekhyun’s music, he is beginning to realise that there is something crying behind Baekhyun’s angry exterior. Something that is begging to be saved.

He takes Baekhyun at his word and plays louder, sending high notes soaring above the rest. The brighter theme spills out amongst the heavy bass, and Baekhyun’s guitar rises up to echo and match his pace. His delicate fingers flicker over the strings and the dark clouds chase themselves away from his face, and the song transforms from sorrowful longing into a thread of bright hope, and for a moment, they are suspended together in glorious harmony.

Baekhyun’s hands fly sure and deft, plucking the notes from the guitar and sending them soaring through the air.

Those hands are the most beautiful things Yixing has ever seen.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Yixing has almost forgotten about Mademoiselle’s hands. His thoughts have turned to another topic – that of Byun Baekhyun.

Every part of Baekhyun fascinates him, holds him captive in a thrill of enchantment. Baekhyun is trying to hide his beauty from the world, but he cannot hide from Yixing. He remembers how easily and how often Baekhyun used to smile, how his eyes would curve up into laughing crescents, how light seemed to shine from his beautiful face. He remembers the innocence, the eagerness to please, the wide-open heart that was always ready to love.

That person is still in there somewhere. Baekhyun has buried him, but he can’t stop him from coming out in his music.

Something has happened to Baekhyun to make him like this, and Yixing is determined to find out what it is. He won’t let Baekhyun be pulled under by the darkness. He won’t abandon his best friend the way Baekhyun once abandoned him. He will open his scarred heart to Baekhyun again, and if Baekhyun inflicts more cuts and wounds on that soft, secret place inside Yixing, well - Yixing will cherish those scars. 

Sehun finally makes good his promise to find a drummer and brings Kim Jongin to their next practice. Yixing doesn’t know how Sehun found out that the tall, handsome swim team captain, the guy who famously dated Jung Soojung for three passion-filled weeks, is a musician. It’s unexpected, to say the least. Yixing is nervous of Jongin - he is popular, admired by all, everything Yixing is not - but so far Jongin has shown no sign of being dangerous. If anything, he seems as mild-mannered as Yixing himself, quite content to sit quietly behind his drum kit and follow Baekhyun’s curt directions without a murmur.

And if Jongin’s eyes prefer to linger over Sehun’s straight-backed form instead of the notations on his musical score, and if Sehun turns to meet Jongin’s eyes more often than is strictly necessary, nobody notices. Or if they do, nothing is said.

Practices are beginning to go well now. With the addition of Jongin’s drums and Sehun’s rapidly growing ability to emote through his vocals, Baekhyun’s frustration calms somewhat, and they are all able to focus better for it.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Yixing waits between the heavy black curtains of the wings, eclipsed by deep shadows. The stage is bright before his eyes, powerful lights illuminating the colourful set, designed to look like the interior of a grand ballroom. It flickers off the gleaming tutus of the little girls as they perform the children’s dance in front of the crowd of admiring parents and siblings. Yixing knows that every parent thinks their child is the best.

His own parents are not there, and never will be. Among all the students of his ballet school, he is the only one who will dance tonight alone and unsupported.

It is an old hurt, but it doesn’t make the pain any less.

He touches his hair carefully, checking that every strand is sprayed stiffly in place. His face is heavily made-up for the theatre lights, eyebrows darkened and cheekbones highlighted. He wears a stiff brocade tunic and silk tights, and a gold circlet is around his head. Tonight he will dance the Prince in Sleeping Beauty. It is the lead male role, yet Yixing knows the only reason he has it is because of the simple fact that he is the only male dancer above the age of twelve in the entire ballet school. He would not hold up the role in a regular company.

Tonight is the last time he will ever dance a role. He will not continue with ballet next year. The pain of striving so hard, so very hard, only to find that no matter what he does will never be enough, is too much for him to bear.

And so when the grand theme strikes up and the girls run lightly backwards to make room for his entry, he springs onto the stage like a bolt of flame, head held high and proud. He lets the music carry him, gives himself entirely to it. His well-trained body performs the high, floating leaps and complex steps with the semblance of effortless ease.

Nobody is here to watch him tonight, but Yixing performs the solo the best he ever has.

He is to wake the sleeping Princess Aurora with a kiss that does not quite touch her painted lips, as nobody in the audience will know the difference. He bends over Lee Taeyeon arranged in graceful sleep, and freezes, because he suddenly finds himself imagining Baekhyun in her place. Baekhyun’s delicate features, long brown lashes resting against his smooth cheeks, his soft, perfectly formed lips parted softly in waiting, waiting…

Taeyeon opens her eyes, confused by Yixing’s hesitation, and the vision dissolves into mist and slips away.

The _pas de deux_ with Aurora flows in a similar fashion to his solo. The dance is long, long and exhausting, but tonight Yixing feels no fatigue. He watches as if from afar as he lifts Taeyeon high above his head, places her oh-so-lightly down on the tip of her pointe shoes, careful not to lower her too quickly and bruise her toes. Her hands stretch out, light as sunlight on rippling water, and for a moment they are almost as beautiful as Mademoiselle’s.

Almost as beautiful as Baekhyun’s.

He takes his curtain call, Taeyeon on his arm. She waves and smiles to the applauding crowd. Yixing knows none of that applause is for him. Everyone in the theatre is a parent; they cheer for their child and theirs alone. He tries to smile anyway, but he cannot. On the stage, surrounded by clapping, cheering people, he has never felt more alone.

A movement at the back of the theatre catches his eye. Someone is leaving early, and there is something familiar in that person’s slouching gait that makes Yixing tilt his head and look more closely. Surely he knows the person? – but the shadowed figure slips out of the doors and out of sight before he can place them.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

It turns out that one of Yixing’s classmates has a little sister who was a courtier last night, and when Yixing arrives at school and begins to walk the hallways to his locker, they are ready and waiting for him.

“Hey, fag,” someone taunts. “Heard you looked pretty last night.”

“Where’re your tights, faggot?”

“Where’s your tutu?”

Yixing puts his head down and tries to ignore them. It’s nothing new. He tries to pretend he doesn’t hear, that he doesn't care, but the words slice like knives into his chest.

“I’m talking to you, freak,” a taller boy hisses, stepping directly in front of Yixing so that he is forced to stop walking. It is Choi Dongwook, and Yixing is shocked by the sheer venom in Dongwook’s voice. What did he ever do to Dongwook to make him hate him so?

 _Ignore them,_ he tells himself. _Ignore them._

“He’s pretending to ignore us,” someone laughs.

“Fag,” a heavy shove against his arm knocks him off balance, sending him clanging against the lockers. “Show us a plie _,_ go on.”

“Show us a pirouette _._ ”

“Nah, show us your tights. I bet you get off real good wearing tights.”

Yixing is surrounded. Nowhere to run. His eyes scan the gathering crowd desperately. Where is Sehun?

“Leave me alone,” he mutters.

Choi Dongwook smirks. “Leave me alone,” he mimics in falsetto. “What’s the matter, ballerina? Do real boys play too rough for you?”

Yixing is pressed hard up against the metal lockers. Someone’s key digs painfully into his back. Dongwook leans over him, an arm above his head. Yixing smells cigarettes and Lynx.

“Should we teach you how to play with real boys?” He places his other arm across Yixing’s throat. “Or would you rather be fucked? How do you take cock, huh? Mouth or ass? Huh, fairy boy? Huh?” The arm across his throat presses harder, right against his larynx. Yixing could not reply if he wanted to. He clenches his fists. He hates fighting more than anything, but these boys will regret it if they force him to defend himself. They think dancers are delicate, doll-like things, unable to do much more than stand on tip-toe and look pretty. They are ignorant. Years of ballet training has given Yixing muscles of rope and steel. Being the only guy in _pas de deux_ class and having to lift twelve different girls over your head dozens of times a week will do that to a person.

A scream of rage makes everyone’s heads fly up. The next thing Yixing knows, Dongwook is knocked aside in a flying tackle. Two boys crash to the ground and start wrestling there, cries and screams fill the air, and Yixing is frozen in gape-mouthed astonishment, because the person who has just tackled Choi Dongwook to the floor is none other than Byun Baekhyun.

Baekhyun’s face is twisted into an animal snarl. He is far outweighed by Dongwook, but he makes up for the size difference in sheer fury as his fist balls up and smashes into Dongwook’s face. Dongwook cries out as red blood erupts from his nose.

“Fight! Fight!” The excited chant echoes through the corridor.

“Baekhyun!” Yixing’s body unfreezes at the sight of the blood. Dongwook is yelling, but Baekhyun has gone eerily silent. He grabs Dongwook’s hair and uses it to smash the other boy’s head repeatedly into the floor.

“Stop!” Yixing grabs Baekhyun around the waist, tries to pull him off Dongwook.

“Let go!" Baekhyun screams, struggling like a wild thing. "LET GO!"

Dongwook scrambles backward on his ass, choking and spitting out blood.

“Baekhyun, stop, please,” Yixing begs. “You're hurting him –"

“GET OFF ME!” Baekhyun howls. He lashes out wildly and his sharp elbow catches Yixing in the eye. He cries out, the explosion of pain momentarily blinding. He lets go of Baekhyun and stumbles back into the lockers, puts his hand to his eye.

“What is going on here?”

The shout belongs to the P.E teacher, wading through the clustered students. Yixing stays where he's leaning against the lockers as more teachers show up and start dispersing the crowd, one hand still covering his throbbing eye. His mind is blank with shock.

“Yixing?”

Baekhyun is in front of him, face white to the lips. He's shaking so badly his teeth are chattering, and his eyes are filled with such terror that Yixing is utterly shaken to see it. “D-did I h-hurt you - I’m s-sorry - I d-didn’t mean –“

“Byun Baekhyun!”

They both look around at the P.E teacher's thundering shout. Choi Dongwook is pointing a trembling finger at Baekhyun from the floor, his face and shirt covered with blood. Yixing just stands there as the teacher takes Baekhyun by the arm and begins dragging him away down the corridor. He watches until Baekhyun’s thin back disappears from sight, and is unable to focus on one of the art teachers trying to gently pull his hand away from his eye, asking him if he is hurt.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

When Yixing has cleared the shock from his mind and convinced the school nurse that his eye is fine, just needs a bit of ice, he makes a beeline for the principal’s office. Baekhyun could get suspended for fighting, and Yixing doesn’t trust him to explain the situation properly in his current state.

He explains earnestly to the principal that Dongwook had been threatening him and that Baekhyun was acting in defense, and because Yixing is a good student and Dongwook is notorious as a fighter and instigator of trouble, he is believed. Baekhyun is released with a warning of instant suspension if another incident happens this year.

Baekhyun is silent as they walk down the empty corridors. They are supposed to return to class, but somehow, without speaking, they find their way to the music wing instead, and lock themselves in the blessed silence of a small practice room.

Yixing drops onto the piano stool and places his elbows on the keys, cradling his head in his hands as a dissonant seventh rings out. Baekhyun slides down into the space between the piano and the wall and draws his knees up to his chest. His face is still a ghastly white, and Yixing takes his head from his hands to look at him. He looks ill, he thinks.

“Baekhyun...are you okay?”

Baekhyun nods, and closes his eyes, tipping his head back against the wall.

Yixing doesn’t know what to say. His eyes travel Baekhyun’s curled-up form, linger over the hollow at the base of his throat where his collarbones join. There is a blue shadow of bruising along his neck. Yixing thinks he sees finger marks, but he does not remember Dongwook grabbing Baekhyun’s neck.

The delicate bones of Baekhyun’s wrists jut out beneath skin that is almost translucent, and his arms are tucked against his body like the fragile wings of a bird, and Yixing has the sudden impression that at any moment, Baekhyun could take flight, and soar away into the endless sky.

“Play something.”

Baekhyun's voice is a whisper. Yixing's forehead creases. “Huh?”

Baekhyun doesn’t move, doesn’t open his eyes. “Play something for me.”

Yixing exhales. He sits up straighter, rests his fingers on the keys, and begins the _grand pas de deux_ from the ballet last night. Tchaikovsky fills the small practice room. _A dance for two_. He glances at Baekhyun and sees the ghost of a smile hover about his lips.

It is the first time in many years Yixing has seen Baekhyun smile.

When the piece is over, Baekhyun speaks softly into the silence.

“You were good, last night. The Prince.”

Yixing catches his breath. He remembers the shadowed figure slipping from the back of the theatre, places the gait, the slouch of thin shoulders. Of course it was Baekhyun. How had he not known it straight away?

He had been wrong, then. Somebody had been there to witness Yixing's last dance, his swan song. Somebody had been there for him, after all.

He looks down at Baekhyun again. He is very still now, curled up against the side of the piano with his eyes closed and the blue veins showing on his paper-thin eyelids. Yixing’s mind flashes beyond his control, showing him the vivid memory of another person - another one he loved who looked this way - and he has a sudden, heart-stopping fear that Baekhyun is dead.

He drops to his knees and reaches out desperately – but there, he breathes, and Yixing's breath lets out in a sob.

Sleeping.

Stupid, Yixing.

Of course he is just sleeping.

Carefully, so carefully, to do it without waking him, he sits down beside Baekhyun. He takes his head and moves it gently into his lap. Baekhyun sighs in his sleep. His face is open and soft, and he looks so young, unguarded and vulnerable. Yixing strokes Baekhyun’s hair and gazes at his face. Ten times more beautiful than the Sleeping Beauty. Ten times more perfect than an angel.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Yixing is in the wings again. Not the black hanging cloth of the ballet school’s simple theatre this time – now he stands at the back of the huge, modern amphitheatre downtown. Instead of chairs placed on the flat floor below, rows of seats rise up and away from the stage in a circular formation, vanishing high into the gloom of the dimmed house lights. He will look up at the audience, instead of down. Front and centre will be the judges, with their keen eyes and keener ears, watching and waiting like giant birds of prey ready to swoop down at the first sign of weakness and tear them apart.

The noise of the currently playing band is so loud that Yixing can barely hear himself think. Like the others, he is wearing a printed number pinned to the front of his t-shirt – 13 - a prime number. He cannot remember if 13 is supposed to be lucky or unlucky. He hopes it is a good omen. The number will tell the waiting judges which band they are, out of all these hundreds of hopefuls. Their names are not important. Not yet. They have to prove themselves by their music first.

He glances at the others. The group seems poised on a knife-edge of success or failure. Two possibilities, two outcomes, hang in the balance, and which one they will receive will change their lives forever.

Out of the five of them, Yixing is probably the calmest. He is used to performing on stage, after all, even if this is like no performance he’s ever given before. He is used to the nerves that flutter in his stomach and make his breathing go shallow in his chest. He is used to the fear of failure, of humiliation, of letting down those who depend on him, and so he controls it, and his soft brown eyes watch the others.

Sehun’s lips are moving, and so is the rest of his body. He can’t seem to stay still for longer than a second, bobbing on the balls of his feet, moving his arms and legs fretfully, flinching at every crash from the drummer of the band currently on stage. His lips twitch and mutter, but if Sehun is speaking aloud, Yixing can’t hear the words.

Jongin puts an arm around Sehun’s shoulders. The younger boy’s head jerks around, and then his wound-up body relaxes as he leans into Jongin’s hold. Yixing smiles.

Chanyeol is standing a couple of feet away from the group. He is silent as always, eyes distant and unfocused, and his long limbs hang loose and limp at his sides. Yixing wonders what Chanyeol is thinking. Is he nervous? If he is, Yixing cannot tell. He can never tell what Chanyeol is thinking. He seems to be locked away behind a kind of protective mask that, unlike Baekhyun’s, does not show any signs of cracking.

He looks at Baekhyun. Baekhyun’s shoulders are sharp with tension and his eyes glitter feverishly in their hollows. His entire body radiates the air of a wire tightened far beyond its limit, at risk of snapping at any moment and slashing through anything that gets in its way. Yixing wants to hold Baekhyun like Jongin is doing for Sehun, but he’s afraid that if he touches him, Baekhyun will simply shatter.

He can sense Baekhyun’s turbulent emotions so strongly. It is Baekhyun’s music they are performing, the expression of Baekhyun’s soul, and if the judges criticize their music, they are criticizing a deep part of Baekhyun himself. Yixing feels his fists clench at the thought of it.

He will perform better than he has ever done before. He will not let Baekhyun be hurt.

 _We’ll be okay, Baekhyun._ _Now that we’re together._

_I_ _promise._


	3. Jongin

Jongin is absorbed in a four-beat rhythm. _Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe –_ the fourth beat the regular gasp as he tilts his face out of the turbulent green water and drags oxygen into his burning lungs. He cannot hear anything over the rush of water in his ears, but he feels his heart pounding hard and steady against its cage of ribs. It makes a counterpoint to his disciplined breathing, a second rhythm beating slightly wrong against the first, so he increases his pace slightly to match the hammering of his heart. _Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe -_

 _Turn._ He tucks his head and spins in a swift tumble beneath the water's surface, pushes hard against the wall with both feet. For a moment there is a pause in the rhythm. He is a straight swift arrow cutting through the water for a measure of breathless waiting _one two three_ , and then his head breaks the surface and his arms burst into rapid motion and the rhythm begins again. _Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe._

That three to one rhythm is echoed in the pattern of today's workout. As the captain Jongin arrives at the pool first every morning, even before the coach, and writes the team's warmup in squeaky marker on the whiteboard easel. Today his world is walking to the beat of three to one, and so he writes his workout. Three lengths of slow strokes, one of fast. Three lengths of breast stroke, one of butterfly. Three lengths of kickboard, one of sculling. Then, to change it up a little, moving to double-time, a seven-eight sprint through the resisting water. The ratio 3:1 dominates Jongin's world and carries him through the endless workout. It sings its own special resonance through his mind, blocking out all else. _Stroke, stroke, stroke, breathe._

The blast of the whistle shrieks through the swimming hall and squeals, muted, through the water. The beats propelling Jongin's body vanish like a drop of ink dissolved in water, and suddenly it is just hard. So hard. The water pushes at him instead of parting for him, and his lungs are on fire and so are his eyes, and his body is screaming at him to stop, stop swimming now or he'll surely die –

His hand hits the wall. He grips the little ridges at the edge of the tiles with trembling fingers, rips off his goggles and hangs there, panting like a dog, chest heaving. Seconds later, the rest of the team pull up and do the same. Jongin always pushes them to their maximum capacity. It is only there, in that space of pure, exquisite, bloody effort, where he finds peace of mind. It is only in that special place born of pushing beyond his limits where the world seems like it might have some meaning, if only he could push himself just that tiny bit harder.

“Coach, Jongin is trying to kill us,” someone complains once their breathing has calmed somewhat.

 _No,_ Jongin thinks. _I am not trying to kill you._

_I am trying to save you._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The four-beat cadence of the day carries Jongin through school. In French it teases at his fingertips, makes his hands twitch. He wants to beat his fingers against his leg, against the chair, the edge of his desk, anything to put into physical sound the percussive tones that echo through his mind.

He puts his head down and resists the urge. Teachers, for some reason, don’t like it when you drum on the desk.

His hair flops into his eyes, smelling of chlorine. He always smells of chlorine. The perfume of a swimmer. Once, Jongin used to hate the smell, hate the way it dries out his skin and irritates his eyes. Now, it has become a part of life, a necessary evil, a daily torment that has lost its pain through regularity. Rinse and repeat.

Jongin doesn't quite know when swimming stopped being fun and started being necessary. The line seems to blur in his memory. Was it when he was eight, and he was scouted from the recreation classes into his first competitive team? Was it when he was eleven, and competing in his first big regatta? Was it when he was fourteen, and he broke his age group record, and his training increased to three hours a day?

His fingers flick against each other, the sound of skin on flesh and bone so quiet only he can hear it. Drums percuss through his body.

Perhaps swimming was never fun. Like breathing isn't fun. It just exists, a vital part of life. Without breathing, people cannot live. Likewise, without swimming, Jongin...

But is that really true? Is that what Jongin really feels, or is it just another lie he tells himself to make the world seem bearable for just one more day?

He rubs his sore eyes and stares hopelessly at his textbook. The letters blur and jump on the page, shuffling themselves slyly while Jongin is trying to pin them down. Hangeul is hard enough to read, but at least its box-like structure gives his eyes something to anchor onto. The long, straight lines of the Latin alphabet writhe along the page like snakes. He squints, and the _o_ 's and _a's_ lift off the white paper and spin around like pinwheels in front of him. The _g's_ and _p's_ with their heavy tails are slower to follow, floating before him awkward and unbalanced. The letters dance together in the air and then drift towards the open window, where they make a bid for freedom and slip out of the crack between the windowsill and the sash. He thinks he hears their tiny laughter as they're caught up by the wind and swept into the endless sky.

_I'm sorry, Mademoiselle, I couldn't do the test. The letters all floated away._

If he knew enough French, he could say it, but no matter what language he speaks in, Jongin knows it will not work. It is better to pretend not to care than to be seen to try hard and fail. On the cliff of high school popularity, cool is better than smart, but smart is still better than dumb. Jongin is not smart, so he must be cool, or he faces being pushed over the edge and falling, falling -

_it is not the fall that kills you -_

dead before he hits the ground.

So he leaves his test sheet completely blank, because then his grade will be recorded as “did not sit” rather than “fail”, and it is obvious even to the dumbest person which is better.

As he waits for the class to be over, he senses, rather than sees, a pair of eyes on him. The pressure of that person’s gaze itches at his back, but he refuses to look around. He knows who is watching him, and the thought of making eye contact with that person sends phantom shivers chasing themselves all over his skin, and that shouldn’t happen.

He must be imagining the excitement that kindles in his chest and fizzes through his veins. He must be creating the desire that makes the back of his neck heat up and crawl up to colour his ears. He must be dreaming when the thought crosses his mind that the person watching him is beautiful.

_Beautiful?_

He must be crazy.

He imagines what his father would say, and a real shiver touches his skin, raising gooseflesh.

Crazy would be better, because no matter what, he must not have thoughts like that about a boy. He must not think that way about Oh Sehun.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

With three long hours of swim training and three longer hours of classes behind him, Jongin’s stomach is trying to stick itself to his spine by the time the clock hands drag their way to one. The lunch bell shrills through the classrooms and Jongin grabs his bag and almost runs towards the door. The cafeteria line will grow longer with every passing second, and he needs to eat something before his stomach begins to digest itself. The steady tempo of the clock _tick-tock tick-tock_ clicks through his mind and his head nods unconsciously to a pattern nobody else can hear. 60 beats per minute. A pulse at rest. A second, an hour, a day.

Preoccupied with thoughts of food, Jongin rounds the corner of the building too fast and collides with another person. He staggers sideways and grabs the wall, but the other kid, shorter and slightly built, bounces off his chest and is knocked to the ground.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry -” Jongin pushes himself off the wall and reaches out a hand.

“Get off!” His hand is knocked away. Jongin blinks, bewildered by the violence of the rejection. The boy scrambles to his feet and holds his elbow, grimacing.

“Are you okay?” Jongin tries again, but hostility is radiating from this kid and Jongin almost finds himself backing away despite his obvious physical advantage. Concern wrinkles his forehead as he notices blood begin to seep between the boy’s fingers. “I’ll take you to the nurse –”

“Forget it,” the other boy spits. There's an awkward pause, and then the boy mutters a curse under his breath and jerks away. Jongin watches until he disappears around the back of the cafeteria.

He swallows his lingering unease and resumes his pace. If the boy is headed back there, he must be one of those kids who prefers to smoke and do who knows what else rather than eat. No wonder he looked so thin.

No point in trying to reason with that kind of person.

He tries to put the incident from his mind, but the boy’s expression haunts him as he waits in line for his meal. Before the shutter of hostility had come down, just for an instant, that kid had looked - what? Not angry. Vulnerable.

“Jongin, over here!” someone yells, and he takes his tray and forces his way through the crowd towards his mates. He squeezes his way onto the bench between Dongwook and Minho, spares his friends a brief grin in return to their calls of welcome before falling on his food as if he hasn’t eaten for a week. He doesn’t tune into the babble of conversation and jokes. Food is the most important thing right now – until, as if his ears are as attuned to it as they are to the sound of his own name, a sneering phrase jumps out of the noise.

“That’s so gay.” 

Jongin’s hand jerks and his glass goes flying, spilling water across the table. He grabs the rolling glass before it can fall off the table and jumps to his feet.

“Watch it, man!” Dongwook complains. Jongin tries to stem the flood with the sleeves of his shirt and utterly fails – the thin fabric is instantly soaked and the spreading puddle isn’t affected at all. The others lift their trays away from the flood with various annoyed noises.

“I got it.” Someone tosses a handful of paper napkins onto the table and uses them to mop up the liquid. Jongin turns and looks into the smoky eyes of Jung Soojung.

“Thanks,” he mutters, taking the soggy napkins from her. She smiles and follows him towards the rubbish bins.

“Oh no, you’re all wet,” she says, taking his arm. The top few buttons of her shirt are undone and when she presses up against his arm she gives him a perfect, deliberate view of her cleavage. Jongin glances away. He knows very well that Soojung is flirting with him, but all he feels about the fact is uncomfortable and mildly annoyed.

 _That’s so gay._ The voice rings in his ears, sharp with scorn.

As an experiment, he imagines Oh Sehun in Soojung’s place, clinging to his arm and peering at him coyly through his lashes, and instantly his body heats up, colour flooding to his face.

“It's nothing,” he says, trying to pull his arm away, but she hangs on determindly.

“Let’s go find you a spare shirt from the uniform office. You mustn’t get sick. What about your swim meet tomorrow?”

“H-how do you know about that?” Jongin stammers.

She smiles up at him. “Perhaps I take an interest. Since it’s you.”

Jongin allows her to pull him out of the cafeteria. Soojung is making a pass at him, he knows that. She probably wants him to ask her out. She’s hot, he knows that too. Any other boy in the school wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a piece of Jung Soojung. Any other boy who wasn’t –

_No. I’m not._

Before he can think better of it, he has Soojung up against the lockers in the empty hallway. He stares down into her upturned face and wills himself to feel something.

“Jongin,” she breathes smokily, reaching her hand up, and he has to force himself not to jerk backward as she grabs his neck and pulls his head down to meet hers. Their foreheads bump together and her lips part softly, and Jongin lets his body fall in closer until he can feel every soft curve of her, pressing hungrily against him.

She kisses him.

Jongin knows what to do. He’s seen movies. He’s seen others do it. He knows what noises to make, what to do with his hands. He tries to respond, pressing more urgently, waiting to get turned on, to feel something, _anything -_

But all he feels is mildly disgusted, and the simple, four-beat rhythm running through his veins, unaffected, undisturbed.

60 beats per minute.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Before long the whole school knows. His mates nudge each other and smirk knowingly at him. Girls whisper and giggle behind their hands. Soojung hangs proudly from his arm at every opportunity, wraps herself around him, glares at any other girl who dares to glance his way. He’s heard the rumours, of course, and he doesn’t deny them. Neither does Soojung, and he wonders briefly if it might have been Soojung who started them. It certainly wasn’t him.

He feels terrible. He’s leading her on, being a total jerk. He knows that, but he doesn’t want to face the knowledge that will come if he admits to himself that there is nothing about Soojung that he finds attractive. He gets through Soojung’s apparently endless hunger for his face by imagining Sehun in her place. Shameful, hot desire floods through him and mixes with denial and guilt until the blend of emotions inside him makes him feel almost constantly sick.

He doesn’t know how to deal with this.

The simple rhythms of his world have altered, changed. Now he walks in five-four time, an extra beat to every bar, leaving him hesitant and uncertain. The rhythm tugs him places he doesn’t want to go. It thuds through his mind,jerking him through the world on a tangent, possessing his mind and body. Everything he does has an air of wrongness to it. Guilt over what he is doing to Soojung twines itself around his desire for Sehun until the two problems seem twisted into one huge, inescapable disaster.

He locks himself in his shed and hammers out patterns on his drums until the sweat is pouring down his face and the drumsticks are slippery in his hands, but no matter what he does, he can’t get that five-four time sign out of his head.

It doesn’t help that Mademoiselle seems to have singled himself and Sehun out of the French class as examples of what and what not to do. Jongin would feel humiliated by the way he consistently fails to pronounce even the most basic French sounds correctly in front of the entire class, but he does not, because he knows that every time he mangles Mademoiselle’s native tongue into an inexplicable mess, Sehun will be called upon to correct it. And then Sehun will stand up, tall and thin and straight-backed, and his eyes will flick nervously towards Jongin, and the French sounds will flow from his lips, and just for those few instants the pounding of the unbalanced five-four beats will fade away and Jongin will be suspended in the bliss that is Oh Sehun.

Mademoiselle stops him before he leaves class, beckons him to approach her desk with one long, red-tipped finger. Jongin approaches warily as the classroom empties. 

“ _Felix, mon enfant,_ what is ze meaning of zis?” She brandishes a sheet of paper at him. Jongin squints at the text that writhes along the page, and after a pause that is five beats too long, he finally recognizes the words as belonging to the French test he left completely blank last week.

“Oh, that,” he mumbles. He drops his head and rolls his ankles outward, balancing on the edges of his sneakers.

“ _Zat,_ he says.” Mademoiselle rolls her eyes skywards and speaks a string of incomprehensible sounds to the ceiling. “ _T_ _out vient à point à qui sait attendre..._ Felix _,_ zis “ _zat” ,_ as you call 'im, is telling me in one term you have learnt nothing – but _nothing._ What am I to do? What am I to explain to your so-diligent headmaster? Is it zat you wish to fail?”

“No, Mademoiselle.”

“Zen what?”

Jongin keeps his head low. He cannot explain. She will not understand, and it is not just the language barrier. In cases like this, he knows from experience, silence is better than attempting to explain himself. Silence gives the teachers nothing to work with. Silence will not betray him. They will call him _insolent, uncommunicative, sullen_ , but all those words are better than _stupid._

“Ah, my Felix.” Her voice has softened. “Me, I do not wish you to fail either. My language, he is hard, but not impossible. I shall ask _mon petit_ Victoire to help you. He is a natural. He will tutor you.”

Jongin’s head flies up and his eyes go wide. _Victoire_ is Sehun. Get tutored in French by Sehun? His mind starts running in triple-time, leaping to catch up with his suddenly racing pulse. Images flash before his eyes. Sehun and himself, alone, together, sitting at the desk so close they almost touch. Sehun speaking the French sounds to him, coaxing the right sounds from Jongin’s stubborn lips. The pair of them poring over books together –

His dream ends in a painful jerk, a shin barking up against an unexpected obstacle, because Sehun will find out that Jongin cannot really read.

“No,” he says desperately. “No, please. I don’t need tutoring. I’ll do better on my own. I promise.” And his plea is so earnest that Mademoiselle sighs and shakes her head and lets him go.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Jongin has remembered why he swims. His carefully constructed world is crumbling around him, but through swimming, he can lose himself in physical effort. So he trains. He pushes himself into trembling exhaustion every morning, and every afternoon he lets himself back into the pool so that he can swim again, long hours of lonely thrashing up and down, up and down. Five-four tempos drag his mind in impossible sideways-backwards angles and Soojung's kisses throb and sting against his reluctant skin.

It is not enough.

He comes earlier to morning workouts, swims through the dark pre-dawn before the others arrive. He pushes himself to the brink of agony and beyond, ignoring the sidelong glances of his team members, fending off the probing questions from his increasingly worried coach. He trains until exhaustion numbs every emotion and he drags himself through the days in a haze of fatigue, because numbness is better than the alternative.

Until the morning comes that he cannot get out of the pool.

He pushes his arms against the side, tries to lift himself out of the water with the ease he has always done, but he feels like he’s been put through a blender, muscles and bones and tendons all chopped up into a quivering mess. He pushes again, and again, but each time he slips weakly back into the pool. Confusion and exhaustion war with each other and bright sparks float before his eyes, and there is a roaring in his ears that has nothing to do with the water.

“Jongin?” Someone crouches at the edge of the pool. Their face is blurred, so much that he cannot tell which team member it is. “You OK?”

“I,” he gasps, resting his head against the edge, glad that it is the shallow end because he doesn’t think he could float right now if he was out of his depth. “I'm - dizzy –“

“Coach!” His teammate’s voice is sharp with alarm, and Coach comes over just in time to lunge to his knees and catch Jongin’s arm as he begins to slip under the water.

They haul him out and crouch over him as he lies limply on the damp tiles, trying to control the nausea and the rushing, roaring sensation in his ears. He's breathing too fast, too loud, and distantly he hears himself and realizes how scary it sounds, but he's too sick and dizzy to care. Right now he can only concentrate on not throwing up, and praying for the horrible brightness to fade.

He lies there until the dizziness finally fades, and the coach helps him to sit up and drink shakily from someone’s water bottle. As the world comes back into focus, embarrassment kindles deep inside him and creeps up through his limbs, a growing burn of shame. He tries to insist that he is fine, that it was just a brief dizzy spell, but they insist on taking him straight to the sick bay. Jongin feels like an idiot, but they are probably right, because his arms and legs have not lost that blended-up, limp feeling and by the time they’ve made it to the office he can barely keep himself on his feet despite being supported on both sides. He collapses onto the bed in one of the nurse’s rooms, and the noises of his teammates and the coach talking fade into silence.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

When Jongin opens his eyes, it is to the knowledge that something has ended. He cannot continue like this. He will not string Soojung along anymore. He will not lie anymore. Not even to himself.

The nurse asks him questions – when did he last eat, how much sleep has he been getting, how much has he been training. She gives him an energy bar, watches until Jongin has eaten all of it, and then drops a bombshell on him that threatens to blow all of his newly found resolve right out of the water.

“You’re exhausted, Jongin. Your coach told me you’ve been overtraining. It’s not healthy – it’s becoming an obsession. We’ve decided you need to take the rest of the season off. It’s dangerous to keep pushing yourself like this.”

“W-what?” Jongin stammers.

“No more swimming, at least this term. I mean it.”

The brittle remains of Jongin's world shatter around him and crumble to the ground in bloody shards. No more swimming? Even Coach agreed?

A bell shrills in his ear. He glances at the clock and sees that it is 3:15. He has slept for most of the day.

After a few minutes Soojung walks in. Jongin looks at her and feels like an empty shell. She sits beside him and wraps her arms around him while he stares straight ahead.

“You scared me, baby,” she whispers.

“Soojung.” Jongin’s voice sounds hollow. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Can’t do what?” She looks up at him, pouts in confusion.

He unwraps her arms from him. “This. I don’t have feelings for you. I’m sorry.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Soojung’s voice begins to tremble. Jongin can’t meet her eyes. She's going to cry, and it's all his fault. He feels like the worst person who ever walked the planet.

“Yes.”

Soojung sobs, and rushes out of the room.

Jongin drops his head into his hands. He is an awful person, he knows that, because beneath his guilt for making her cry, the strongest thing he is feeling right now is _relief._ He doesn’t have to pretend any more. He doesn’t have to try and be someone he isn’t.

_But who am I?_

The emptiness is back, chasing away the other feelings. He doesn’t know the answer to that question. They're stopping him from swimming, taking away the sport that has dominated every day of his life since he was eight years old. If Jongin is not a swimmer, he does not know who he is. Without swimming, he is nothing.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The rumours are everywhere. Perhaps Soojung started them, because they say things that Jongin doesn’t think people would have thought of him on their own. _Soojung dumped Jongin._ The whispers follow him down the hallways. _He’s cold, frigid. He wouldn’t come on to her._

Some of them put into words the fear that whispers at the core of his being. _Maybe he’s gay,_ they say.

Jongin doesn’t deny the rumours. He deserves them, after all. He should never have strung Soojung along. He used her to try and hide the truth from himself as well as everyone else, and she didn't deserve that.

And aren’t the rumours true, anyway?

He stumbles through the day in a daze, seeing nothing, hearing only the whispers. His routine is shattered, his stability gone, his role in the world called into question. In the cafeteria at lunch time, he sits alone for the first time in his school career, and also for the first time, he cannot eat.

 _Who am I?_ he wonders bleakly as he stares at his untouched rice.

He has a strange sensation of falling, a feeling that has nothing to do with the light-headedness that comes from his physical exhaustion. It continues throughout that awful day, full of glances from the corners of their eyes. He has lost the battle. He is not the popular athlete Jongin anymore. He is nothing, and they know it, and he is falling from the cliff edge -

_it is not the fall that kills you -_

Falling, falling, falling…

In French, Jongin discovers that he is not the only person in the world to have lost something. Somewhere in the course of the day the news about a terrorist attack in Paris has filtered its way into his numb brain, but he had not connected it with anything to do with himself. Paris is half the world away, after all, and it is sad and scary what happened there, but it has nothing to do with him.

Or so he thought.

He sits inside the silent classroom, one of thirty frozen students, as Mademoiselle sobs brokenly over her desk.

Heat prickles at the back of Jongin's eye sockets. He cannot bear this open expression of grief. His own problems have got nothing on this, but it doesn’t make them seem any smaller. Instead, he just feels guilt on top of everything else. He is selfish, and the terror victims have it worse, but the knowledge doesn’t fill the emptiness inside him. It doesn’t stop his fall.

His fingers move to the edge of his desk and begin tapping out a rhythm. Slow and simple at first, then growing in speed and complexity. Jongin doesn’t even realize he is doing it until the muted percussive thuds of flesh and bone against wood begin to penetrate his despair and relax him somewhere deep inside.

Once he realizes, he does not stop. Mademoiselle isn’t going to stop him, not now. The rhythm jumps and stutters through the silent classroom, a counterpoint to Mademoiselle’s weeping. The pattern lifts him and carries him far, far away, into a world that is constructed of pulses and beats, and there he finds a shred of comfort.

When the principal dismisses them and Jongin pours into the hallway along with his twenty-nine shaken classmates, someone catches his wrist before he can be swept away in the current.

“Jongin,” a voice says, and Jongin turns in amazement, because nobody has ever said his name with such nervousness and hope.

Oh Sehun stares at him, eyes wide and vivid. He looks as startled as Jongin feels, and the place where his fingers have wrapped around Jongin's wrist tingles like electricity. Sehun flicks his fringe aside with a coltish toss of the head.

“Are you a drummer?” 

It is such an unexpected question that Jongin is shocked out of his despair. Joy springs to life within his chest and spills out to fill his empty shell with light and the beginnings of hope, and he feels his face slip into an expression that has become unfamiliar in the last couple of weeks.

“Yeah,” he says, pleased to find his voice containing just the right amount of casual interest, though his ridiculously wide smile is surely betraying him. “I’m a drummer.”

Sehun’s smile lights up the whole universe.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Jongin’s friends have abandoned him as if he had never existed, and his mornings are empty. His body has been trained over the years to wake at five am, and now his eyes spring open automatically even without the alarm, and he lies silently in the darkness and waits for the rest of the world to stir.

But the strange thing is, he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t feel the loss of the friends who, it seems, never cared about him anyway; they certainly turned their backs quickly enough when his luck changed. He doesn’t miss the camaraderie of crowded cafeteria lunchtimes, doesn’t miss the subtle pride that came with being one of the in-crowd, looking down from their pedestal upon those who are not so lucky. Now his breaks are filled with band practices with people who do not offer friendship with such careless ease. They have deeper souls to offer, and access to their hearts must be earned.

Swim training seems like a long-ago torture, its pain slipping away as it becomes little more than memory. He lies in his bed in the blue dawn and listens to the subtle rhythms of the world. He hears the beating of a bird's wings, the creak of a cicada, the moan of the wind through the tree branches that tap, tap against his window, and the sounds all swirl and combine into the rhythm of life that hides beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday things.

_It was not the fall that killed me…_

_It was the fall that saved me._

The sensation of falling has left Jongin now. It is as if, after being pushed from the cliff and suffering the terror of the fall, he has found himself in a valley where the trees and flowers are so beautiful that he realizes the top of the cliff was nothing but a dry ridge where nothing grew and the cold wind blew. He remembers that barren place and does not wish to claw his way back up. Why should he, when things are so much more interesting down here?

Safe behind his drum kit, he has a perfect view of the dynamics of the band. He has more freedom than the others too. Baekhyun gives him an indication of the tempo he wants, where there should be a crash or a drumroll, and Jongin can improvise within that framework. He is lucky Baekhyun seems to be more lenient with him than the others, because he can't read music any more than he can read French.

Band practices are tight and edgy with a tension that hides just beneath the surface, but threading through it all, Jongin senses something special. A fragile bond that is slowly becoming stronger, as each member offers a little more of themselves each day.

When practice is over the others begin to pack up their instruments as usual, snapping guitars into hard cases, unplugging amplifiers and tucking sheet music into folders until the practice room is looking vaguely presentable again. Jongin slips his drumsticks into their case and hovers on the brink of saying something, but it is not until Chanyeol’s large palm touches the door handle that the words finally spring to his lips.

“Guys, want to hang out? Play basketball or something? I have the key to the sports locker.” He holds up the jingling key between two fingers invitingly. Coach never asked for it back, and Jongin hasn’t offered. Why give up free access to the school’s sports equipment unless forced to?

There is a startled silence within the music room. Jongin’s eyes flit uncertainly from person to person. He doesn’t know any of them well enough, and the only way he knows how to make connections is through sport. But these guys aren’t like the others he's known. They’re musicians, artists, dreamers. Maybe they don’t like games. He tries not to look too eager. It’s not cool to care too much.

“I’m in,” someone says, and to Jongin’s intense surprise, the voice belongs to Baekhyun. Then, as if Baekhyun’s acceptance gives them all permission, Sehun and Yixing are nodding their heads. Chanyeol doesn't react beyond watching the others, silent and guarded as usual, but he doesn't walk away either.

Jongin's relief and joy feels like it's spilling over, out of his eyes and through his smile. There's nothing like a good game to make a group bond together. Baekhyun may be their official leader, but Jongin is the one with experience of building a team. He may not be swim team captain anymore, but that doesn’t mean his skills have vanished.

They go to the empty concrete basketball courts and play half-court. Jongin expects to be the best – after all, these guys are musicians, not athletes, not like him – but Baekhyun surprises him for the second time by being not only fast, but an excellent shot as well. Chanyeol is the second surprise of the match. He is the tallest by far and therefore should have an advantage in basketball, but his long limbs are clumsy and slow to react. He stumbles around the court with the endearing willingness of a young giraffe while the others run rings around him. Sehun and Yixing are both passable, but Yixing can jump the highest of them all. Must be all that ballet.

Jongin hasn’t had so much fun in weeks. His body revels in the activity, muscles and lungs burning in a way they haven’t been allowed to since he was forbidden to train. They play until the sun is low in the sky and all of them are dripping with sweat, and when their legs will simply not run any further, they collapse in a laughing, exhausted heap onto a pile of leaves that have drifted down from the trees. Jongin rolls onto his back and stares up at the darkening sky with the peace of happy tiredness filling him. Next to him, Sehun pushes himself up onto one elbow and grins mischievously into his face.

“We won,” Sehun says. “Me and Yixing and Chanyeol. We totally beat you and Baekhyun.”

“No you didn't. Baekhyun scored two three-pointers, that makes us the winners.”

“You never said we were counting three-point shots,” Yixing says. “That wasn’t part of the rules.”

“It’s basketball! That’s always the rules!” He sits up, exasperated, and Sehun laughs, a sudden, free laugh that seems to hang in the still autumn air.

“Dude, you’ve got half a tree in your hair.” He reaches out and Jongin bends his head, allows Sehun to pick the dead leaves out of his thick locks, and is unable to keep the smile from his face.

Neither Baekhyun nor Chanyeol have said a word. Jongin watches them from beneath his lashes as Sehun picks leaves from his hair. Chanyeol is sitting cross-legged, staring silently across the cracked concrete court and the chain-link fence and into the setting sun. Next to him, Baekhyun shreds a leaf with careful, methodical movements. He strips away the dead, brittle flesh until he holds a skeleton of a leaf between his delicate fingertips, a thin brown stalk with thinner veins that branch out into nothingness. He twirls the skeleton leaf between his fingers, regards it with intense focus. The strange, surreal beauty of Baekhyun strikes Jongin as the amber rays of the setting sun play across his face. He feels a sudden urge to call Baekhyun back from whatever thoughts are consuming him right now. 

“Baekhyun, you’re so good at basketball,” he says. At the sound of his name Baekhyun flinches, and then turns it into a shrug with such practiced ease that Jongin wouldn’t have noticed had he not been watching so closely.

“Do you play for a team or something?” asks Sehun.

“Nope,” Baekhyun says, and smirks. “I guess I'm just naturally talented.”

Sehun throws the pile of leaves he has picked out of Jongin’s hair at Baekhyun.

There's a collective gasp as the golden-brown leaves float around Baekhyun, settling in his hair and on the shoulders of his shirt. Everyone freezes, even Sehun. His eyes go completely round, obviously as shocked by his own action as everyone else. Jongin makes an abortive half-movement towards him, as if to protect him from the imminent explosion.

Baekhyun’s face is completely blank. He gathers up the leaves one by one while they watch on tenterhooks. Then he lunges towards Sehun and, tackling him onto his back, scrubs the dead leaves vigorously through his hair. The tension in the air vanishes as Sehun shrieks and squirms. Jongin’s heart seems to lift and swell in his chest. His eyes meet Yixing and they share a glance of amazement. Then Yixing throws his head back and laughs.

Jongin joins in, tackling Sehun around the waist and holding him down while Baekhyun pokes leaves down the younger boy’s shirt. It turns into a kind of messy free-for-all, with everyone trying to stuff leaves down each other’s shirt, and Jongin throws himself into the silly game with a joyful rhythm pounding through his heart.

“Help,” Baekhyun cries as Jongin pins him down and stuffs handfuls of the crackling stuff down his back. “Jongin is trying to kill me!”

 _No,_ Jongin thinks, as the words echo through his memory. He has heard them before, he thinks, and his memory places his response clearly through his mind as Yixing drags him off Baekhyun with the strength of a trained dancer. _I am not trying to kill you._

_I am trying to save you._

_There is hope,_ the setting sun sings through their laughter. _There is hope._

Perhaps they can all be saved.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Jongin and Sehun find themselves together, behind Jongin’s practice shed, and the sky is looming grey, and the wind whispers around their feet and lifts their hair in its swirling, teasing way.

Jongin sits beside Sehun and closes his eyes. He feels like every nerve in his body is standing on end. He thinks he can feel Sehun’s aura bumping up against his, a sense of electric connection in the air between them. Jongin sits there and shivers with it, and wonders if Sehun feels it too.

Then Sehun says, “So why’d you break up with Soojung?”

Jolted out of his reverie, Jongin opens his mouth, and closes it again, and has no idea how to answer that question.

“Sorry,” Sehun says when Jongin doesn't manage to find words. “That was an asshole thing to ask. I’m always speaking without thinking.” He smacks his forehead and darts a nervous glance his way, and Jongin has to work very hard not to grin ear to ear, because he is just so damn cute.

“It’s okay,” he says, and is thankful that something finally came out of his mouth instead of just idiotic gaping. He feels Sehun’s skittish dismay beside him, and gropes for a way to answer.

“She was pushing too fast and too hard, and I didn't feel the same about her,” he says, and feels the shiver of truth inside his words, as if they are revealing more to than to Sehun. “I…I’m not sure if I felt the same way. I didn't feel anything with her, Sehun.”

He closes his eyes and waits, dreading, for what comes next.

A cool hand touches his, tentatively, and it is like a small patch of electricity that begins on the back of Jongin’s hand and travels through his body. He is so hyperaware of Sehun’s skin against his that he thinks he can almost taste it, taste that slight salty sweetness, that delicious invasion of another person into himself, as if his tongue anticipates what is to come.

 _Go,_ the wind whispers, _go go go go,_ and Jongin opens his eyes and gazes above at the purple-grey sky. The sun makes a late appearance and hangs its head on the horizon. Deep golden rays strike out and illumine the clouds from below, and they are engulfed in a rich, vivid darkness. The first drops of rain fall, heavy and wet on his hot skin.

Sehun’s hand is sliding up his arm, and the sky is melting, rays of colour dripping through the clouds like light refracted from a prism being held underwater. Jongin thinks he is melting too, dissolving at the edges, the boundaries of things all changed up and different. Sehun leans in closer. Warm breath tickles along his jaw, and the heavy raindrops splash onto his head and trickle cold through his hair, and the incredible sensation of having another person so close to him, so very close, sends a golden thrill chasing itself all through Jongin’s body.

 _Go,_ the rain murmurs. _Go…_

He turns his head towards Sehun’s, just enough. Their eyes meet. Sehun’s eyes are wide and filled with a whirlwind of emotions. There is uncertainty, and yes, a little fear, but all the same Sehun is brave enough to reach out for him. Jongin understands Sehun’s fear. It makes him ashamed of his own.

Trembling, he reaches up towards Sehun’s face. He places his palm over Sehun’s wide, frightened eyes, and his pulse is hammering against the fragile skin of his wrist, and when he takes his hand away Sehun’s eyes stay closed. And then he cannot hear the wind or sky or weeping sun. He brushes his lips against Sehun’s, and the world disappears.

They are kissing. Jongin is kissing Sehun. Lips on lips. Tongue on tongue. Jongin sees white, white breath, white heat. He feels a pulse in his mouth, in his throat, through his body, every part of it. He is flying. He runs a hand through Sehun’s hair, pressing hard through the softness. He runs his palms down Sehun’s sides, to his hips. Sehun lets out a moan, and it sparks through Jongin like a firework.

Where even are they? What even exists besides this?

Sehun’s hands are on his face, his neck, his sides. One flutters at Jongin's waist. Slips around his back, up his shirt. 

The rain grows heavier. A distant shout. “Jongin! Sehun!” Yixing is calling them. They pull apart. How much time has passed? Their hair is wet, their shoes and clothes. Two pairs of eyes open and meet, and they are shivering and smiling all at once.

“Coming!” Jongin hollers back. He stands up, pulls Sehun to his feet, wipes away the raindrops that sparkle like tears on Sehun’s cheeks. Their shirts are clinging to their skin, and suddenly both of them are laughing.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

“Group thirteen, ready?”

Sehun’s body, just beginning to relax, springs sharp and upright against Jongin, and jerks away. Jongin lets his arms fall back to his sides reluctantly, feeling the hollow place where Sehun had been like a physical ache.

“Yes.” Sehun nods twice, clasps his hands, unclasps them again and shoves them deep into the pockets of his jeans. The darkness of the wings surrounds them like a physical entity, thick and foreboding. They hover on its brink, five pairs of sneakers toeing the line where the stage lights fall as the band ahead of them crashes out their last chord and scattered applause trickles around the auditorium.

“Go,” the stagehand tells them, _go go go go_ the wings whisper, and they step forward into the blaze of light. Jongin walks towards the drum kit. Unlike swim meets he is fully clothed, but there is no comforting green water waiting for him to block out the stares and engulf him in the turbulent calm amidst the storm. The harsh stage lights are stripping him bare, more than naked, revealing his soul to the world.

He sits behind the drum kit. The stool is still warm from the previous drummer. He curls his fingers around his drumsticks, rests them against the transparent plastic sheet of the snare, adjusts the kicker of the bass drum slightly until it is in place under his foot.

He is at the back of the stage. Yixing is to his right, his fingers flicking deftly over the synthesizer buttons as he sets it to the right tones and sounds, and Jongin wonders how Yixing can look so serene. Chanyeol and his bass guitar are to his left. Chanyeol's face is not calm, exactly, more expressionless. He's looking in Jongin's direction intently, but not at his face. His eyes are directed lower, at Jongin's hands curled around their drumsticks. Baekhyun and Sehun are further forward and Jongin cannot see their faces. His eyes rest on Sehun’s back as he stands before the microphone. There is so much light that he appears as a black silhouette surrounded by an auric haze. The fretfulness that had possessed Sehun earlier seems to have vanished. Now he appears calm and poised, body relaxed as he adjusts the height of the microphone with the confidence of a professional.

Baekhyun’s light voice echoes through his microphone. As their leader, it is his job to introduce them. He bows, and Sehun and Yixing do the same. Jongin follows a beat too late, but at least he's not the only one; Chanyeol bows a fraction of an instant behind Jongin.

Yixing’s hands lift and spread softly over the keys. Chanyeol's fingers curl around the neck of his bass. Baekhyun nods his head and Sehun lifts his chin, and Jongin takes in a breath full of stardust and stage lights and universe.


	4. Baekhyun

Baekhyun’s desk has a broken-off foot. It tilts if he puts any weight on it, tapping its uneven leg against the scuffed linoleum like a blackbird knocking its beak against the window. Tap. Tap.

Baekhyun doesn’t like things that are off-kilter, so he doesn’t use the desk. Instead he leans back in his chair, folds his arms tight against his body and gazes out of the window. There is no bird there, of course, only a brittle tree branch that shifts against the glass when the wind blows. The sky is high and white with cloud. The sun is nowhere to be seen and harsh light is diffused everywhere, hurting his eyes and making him want to narrow them. To block out sight. But he controls the impulse, widens his eyes to the hardness of the light.

The class is psychology, an elective filled with those interested in the many breakings of the human mind. The students are here to learn how chemical constructions in the brain work together to push a person towards the brink of insanity - or perhaps to fulfil the literature credits required for them to graduate.

Baekhyun is here for a different reason.

He is the picture of bored indifference as he slouches in his chair and stares out of the window. He does not write, does not take notes. He doesn’t even really listen. He doesn’t want to give the wrong impression.

But he still hears. His mind is attuned to the subtle music in the teacher’s voice. He takes no notes, and yet he could recite the entire class from beginning to end, word perfect, if he cared to. He used to think it was a gift, this eidetic memory. Now he knows better.

There are some things in life that are best forgotten.

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to deal with pain,” Mr. Park’s voice drifts into Baekhyun’s ears. “Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.”

Baekhyun does not blink. The reflex is his to control, and he resists it despite the prickling of his eyes. He sees a bird soar high, high, a black dot in the bright white sky, and his eyes sting hot and dry.

He knows of the four doors of the mind. He knows them well.

“First,” says Mr. Park, “is the door of sleep. Sleep offers a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, gives distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is injured they may lose consciousness, and someone who hears traumatic news will sometimes swoon or faint. That is the mind’s way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.”

For Baekhyun, the first door is no protection. His eyes are bleak and black with the burning of too many nights spent wide awake, scribbling feverishly in his notebooks and sketchbooks while his body cries for rest, because the dream is always watching him, waiting for his guard to slip. Cold black lumps on cold black floor, glassy eyes and concrete and cobwebs, and he bursts into brittle wakefulness again.

“The second is the door of forgetting,” Mr. Park continues, and Baekhyun’s lips twist. That’s right. Forgetting. As if life was a movie, where the lead character gets amnesia after suffering some terrible blow. As if life is ever that simple. If forgetting is so easy, why can’t Baekhyun do it?

“Third is the door of madness,” and a muscle above Baekhyun’s eyebrow twitches – a reflex that, unlike blinking, he cannot control. Madness. Words crawl spidery and black inside his head, and his fingers itch with the urge to get them out. But the desk is all wrong and he cannot use it, so he writes the words on the white pages of his mind instead of in his notebook.

_Here lies a pile of small and hollow bones, dissembled_

_And within my hollow skull, God whispers_

_Shall these bones live? Shall these_

_Bones live? And the secret hidden_

_In these bones (which are already dry and bleached) whispers to God_

_Let the whiteness of these bones atone_

_And sing to the wind, to the wind only_

_For only the wind will listen -_

Mr. Park is speaking again.

“There are many times when the mind is dealt such a blow that it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.”

No. No matter what Mr. Park says, madness can never be a good thing. Baekhyun refuses to push open that door.

He is afraid of madness.

He stares out of the window and tries to stop hearing, but it is impossible. Even without listening, he cannot stop his ears from hearing. He considers simply standing up and walking out of the class – but he can’t. He is already on shaky ground with his attendance record, and if they send a note home again –

Baekhyun shies away from that dissonant chord and fixes on the safer music of Mr. Park’s rising-falling voice.

He knows what the last door is before Mr. Park gets to it.

The last door is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead.

Or so we have been told.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The school is poised on the brink of five minutes to one. The air is heavy with the anticipation of hundreds of hungry students. Baekhyun slips out of psychology and follows the empty corridors towards the outside. Nobody notices him leaving early. He is a shadow, after all, and good at being invisible, but invisibility isn't such a good thing when the hallways are full of people who will crash their loud voices into him, brush their bodies past him, batter him and bruise him. He needs to be behind the cafeteria at this time, safe in the space between the building and the stone wall that encloses the schoolyard. The chaotic floods of humanity that fill the halls at lunchtime are just too much to bear.

Somebody steps around the corner in front of him. Too close to stop in time, they collide, and Baekhyun finds himself sprawling on the rough concrete. His hand moves to cradle his stinging elbow, but the touch of the other person is worse than the pain. From the places where their bodies connected, black and biting fear wells up and floods sickeningly though him.

“I’m so sorry,” the words come while Baekhyun is trying to swallow back his nausea. A hand appears in his vision. A face looms above him. Pale blonde hair, brushed-gold skin, eyebrows pinched with concern.

“Get off,” Baekhyun snaps, knocking the hand violently aside. He scrambles to his feet and backs away.

“Are you okay?” the other boy asks. Baekhyun eyes him warily. It is one of the kids in his year. His mind automatically flips through the yearbook and matches the face with a name. Kim Jongin.

Jongin is speaking again. Baekhyun looks at him and it is probably the first time he has looked another person in the eye for months. Jongin's voice has surprised him into it, because it is full of something he doesn't ever hear directed towards himself. There is gentleness there. Concern. An essence of innate kindness.

Baekhyun scowls. He doesn't need Jongin’s concern. He doesn’t need his pity and apologies getting under his skin. _Abandoned,_ something echoes deep inside him. It is a feeling with no origin, but none the less strong for that. _Betrayed…_

“Forget it,” he snaps, projecting as much venom as he can muster into his voice, and sees the confusion and hurt cloud in Jongin’s eyes. Usually Baekhyun doesn’t care how his words make other people feel, so long as it makes them leave him alone, but snapping at Jongin feels strangely like kicking a puppy, and his heart gives an unwelcome twinge.

He curses and jerks himself away. What is wrong with him today?

Behind the cafeteria he leans against the sun-drenched concrete, tips his head back, and lets out a breath that seems to cave his chest in. His elbow is still stinging and his fingers come away red when he touches it. He twists his arm this way and that before coming to the conclusion that no matter how hard he tries, it is impossible to get a good look at the back of his own elbow. He spits into his hand and rubs the saliva onto the scrape, refusing to wince at the pain. Then he tugs his sleeve down, hiding the wound from prying eyes. He is used to hiding injuries.

The other boys show up in trickles and drabs. Baekhyun returns their greetings with a half-hearted jerk of his chin. He leans against the wall and absorbs the dusty summer heat like a cold-blooded reptile, a snake basking in the sun. He shakes his head when Lu Han offers him a cigarette. Instead he takes his black marker out of his pocket and crouches down beside the boys who are hand-rolling piles of tiny leaves into thin white paper.

“Me,” Tao says before Baekhyun can even offer. He pulls his sleeve up, exposing a pale forearm as bony as Baekhyun’s. Baekhyun yanks the top off his marker between his teeth. The white skin calls to him, a blank canvas begging to be filled.

He scrawls slowly and steadily onto Tao's arm, and feels the tension leave his chest. The images dance through his mind, and the smoke from Tao’s cigarette wreaths around them both, and he absorbs himself in his work.

He draws a rook, glossy-feathered, wings outstretched as if to fan a flame. There is fire and darkness in its beady staring eye. Graveyard birds, rooks are. They carry the souls of the dead on their backs. He etches a suggestion of shadowy headstones behind the bird, wreathed in creeping mist.

“Cool,” Tao says as the image appears. “I want it as a real tattoo.”

“Got a blade?” Baekhyun asks, his eyes never leaving his work. “Sharp one, mind.”

Tao blinks. Laughs. It is a joke, of course.

“Good one,” Lu Han says, and the conversation turns to what kind of tattoos they will all get the moment they are old enough to be allowed responsibility for their own bodies.

Baekhyun presses his pen down harder, creates a thicker black line. He imagines his pen is a razor-tipped blade, cutting through Tao’s perfect white skin, carving his images into his flesh with its sharp, high-pitched song.

He wasn't joking.

“What do you want?” Standing above them, Lu Han’s voice has gone hard, which tells Baekhyun there is an outsider here, encroaching on their territory. He doesn't look up until the hesitant voice speaks his own name. He recognizes the voice, of course. Oh Sehun is in his maths class, which means that he is smart, because Baekhyun is in the top set for everything. He has no idea, though, why a good, smart kid like Sehun would want to speak to the likes of him. Nor does he care.

It is the second voice that draws Baekhyun's head up completely against his will, because he knows this voice too, and this voice is one he had never thought he would hear speak his name again.

“Baekhyun, please,” Yixing says softly, and something inside Baekhyun's heart twists painfully.

It hurts.

_Abandoned..._

He stands up, and Lu Han looks at him in surprise.

“What about this?” Tao protests. “It's not finished.”

“Later,” Baekhyun says, and feels their eyes boring into his back as he steps over their legs and out into the world.

_Betrayed..._

He doesn't care about Sehun, but he has to know why Yixing is here.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

_Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!”_

_And he said, “Here I am, my son.”_

_“The fire and the wood are here, but_

_where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”_

_Genesis 22.1-7_

Baekhyun’s mother used to read to him every night. A devout Catholic and teacher of the Sunday school classes, she replaced storybooks with the Bible, and found that the ancient stories there were enough to keep him quiet and intrigued. As a child, Baekhyun had not understood the deeper meanings behind the words, but he enjoyed the rhythmic quality of the language, the poetry in the verses written in archaic forms.

He remembers all the words, of course. Sometimes he rewinds through his brain, hears her voice whisper them in his ears, soft and gentle. But now he understands the words, and some of those words are far from comforting. Now they speak to him in a different way.

He lies flat on his back on his bed and traces the cool silver of her crucifix where it nestles in the hollow place where his ribs meet. He never takes it off, not even in sleep. He does not know if he believes in God, but his mother did, and it seems a desecration of her memory to discard her beliefs.

If Baekhyun doesn’t believe in God, does that make his mother’s death nothing but cold emptiness? When her eyes closed for the last time, what happened to the person inside?

_Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told._

The fourth door. The last resort.

His mother’s gentle voice echoes through his memory, reciting in soft tones from the Old Testament, describing with sweet unconcern the story of Abraham and Isaac. Baekhyun knows this story is meant to praise Abraham’s surrender to God’s will. It upholds Abraham and blesses him for being willing to sacrifice his only son. But this pretty story has sharp edges, and Baekhyun always cuts himself on them when he thinks of Isaac.

When Abraham bound him and laid him on the altar and took up the knife to slaughter him like a helpless lamb, what did Isaac feel?

Was he afraid? Baekhyun thinks he must have been afraid. At first he would be disbelieving, unable to comprehend his father’s actions as he bound him hand and foot. And then, when his father’s eyes were emotionless and his weathered face set with bleak intent, oh, then the fear would have come. He feels Isaac’s terror shiver through him, press down on him like a giant invisible hand. Isaac would have cried. He would have fought against his bonds. _Don’t hurt me_ , he would have begged. _Father, please. I am your son_.

Isaac’s pain is close to Baekhyun. So close he can smell it, taste it on his lips.

_Comfort in persecution, his mother whispers. Go, behold; I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. But beware of men, for they will hand you over to the courts and whip you in their synagogues._

_Beware of men_ , the words repeat in Baekhyun’s head. _Beware of men_.

Isaac should beware of Abraham his father.

Baekhyun will not sleep tonight. He knows it even as his eyes burn with tiredness. The cross is heavy on his chest, and there is a vividness, an urgency within that will not let him rest. So he takes a shower and lets the water soothe his bruised and aching body until it begins to run cold. Then he steps out and comes face to face with the mirror. He stares at himself for a few minutes, wet hair dripping all over the place, and the silver cross hanging ever-present on its chain. It is something he does every now and then, staring at his naked form, wondering if he’ll ever see anything different. Echoes of his mother, perhaps; a hint of her warmth, her compassion.

Baekhyun doesn’t see any of that. He never does.

Instead he sees the fire within himself, glittering out at him from the coal-black hollows of his eyes, licking at the sharp jabs of his ribs against his skin, so pale between the shifting patterns of ever-present bruises. He is thin to the point of emaciation, as if something is burning all his substance up from within. He knows it is not healthy to look this way, nor is it attractive, but he finds a strange, twisted pride in his skeletal form, juxtaposed as it is against the effeminate beauty his genes have chanced to create in his face. His body is a physical expression of his mind. Hollow. Tormented. Desperately controlled.

Urgency is building and growing in his mind. He turns away from his reflection, covers his bones with jeans and a hooded sweater, and goes back into his room. He yanks open the drawer of his desk where he keeps his sketchbooks and notepads and rummages through the piles of paper until he finds a manuscript pad, the horizontal bars of blank musical staves waiting to be filled with song. He takes it out, and a handful of ballpoint pens – blue, red, black. They are the cheap, blotchy kind from the corner shop. They always stain his fingers with ink.

He crouches in the corner, his back against the wall. There is a chair at the desk, but it is safer to be curled up tight. Sometimes it is words that flow from the blotchy pens. Sometimes it is drawings of feathers and glassy black eyes, dark echoes of his tormented dreams. Sometimes is not pens and paper that call him and instead he plucks muted melodies from his unplugged electric guitar, the dead strings so quiet even he himself can barely hear them.

Tonight there is a reason for Baekhyun to work. Somehow, Sehun and Yixing have seen something in him that he has tried to hide. They have asked him for his music, and without quite knowing why or even how, Baekhyun has agreed.

So tonight Baekhyun composes.

He loses himself in the act, tight fingers dashing rapid lines along the staves. The music pounds and crashes through his head, the melodies and harmonies sailing on the deep ocean of the bass, carried by the heavy beat of the drum, and he loses all awareness of anything else around him as the notes tear out of him and he scribbles them frantically on his manuscript pad. Here and there he jots down a single word, a phrase, an idea. The lyrics are beginning to cry his name too, but he has to get the music out first. His fingers tear along the page with a greater speed and urgency, ripping deeply out of his soul, leaving him breathless and empty.

And when the song is done and the lyrics are scribbled beneath the lines of music and he is adrift in a sea of torn-off pages, Baekhyun leans his heavy head back against the wall and uncurls with a grimace of cramped-leg pain. Sorrow and anger and hopeless hope have been poured out onto the manuscript pages, leaving him cold and echo-empty.

 _Do I dare,_ he wonders, _do I dare?_

There, at the very edge of the horizon, a smudge of light. It sneaks in through the dusty pane of a window left too long uncleaned and falls onto his hollow, exhausted face. The first breath of sunlight.

_Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Baekhyun watches Sehun flit around the small practice studio, handing out the messy, scribbled copies of his music, apparently unfazed by the harsh words Baekhyun has just spat at him. The memory of Kim Jongin’s kicked-puppy expression leaps into his mind, and he feels strangely relieved that Sehun does not appear to be hurt by the glass-shard words that leap too quickly and too cuttingly from his lips.

His eyes flicker sharply around the room, lingering for a moment on Chanyeol. He hasn’t met the bassist before, and the other boy has yet to speak, greeting the others only with a nod of his head. Baekhyun eyes him with suspicion and mistrust. He knows Yixing, and Sehun is familiar from their shared classes, but Chanyeol and his bass guitar are unknown factors. He watches Chanyeol tune his instrument, using the electronic device Baekhyun has just rejected to get the strings pitch perfect. His face is unreadable, and his eyes give nothing away.

Baekhyun leans against the wall and occupies his hands and mind by tuning his own guitar. Gently he hits the strings, tilts his head to catch the sound, adjusts the tuning pegs until each string sings true. In the repetition of these familiar movements he tries to quell the fear that kindles deep inside his chest and creeps out to shiver in his fingers and toes.

He is not afraid of their opinions of his songs. He is afraid that the music he hears so clearly in his head will not translate into reality. The truth is there, hiding inside his music and his words, but will the others see it? Will they catch it and hold it quivering in their gentle hands like a white-feathered dove? Will they release it to soar high and bright into the empty, waiting air?

Baekhyun doesn’t even know whether he wants them to find it or not. It is so close to his secret heart that he feels like if they do, his soul will be stripped bare for everyone to see.

“Have you got it?” The harshness of his own voice startles him, though he does not let it show. There are nods and murmurs of agreement, so Baekhyun shifts his fingers into the pattern of his first chord and looks at Yixing.

There is only one window in the small studio, a thin oblong crack of a thing near the ceiling, allowing only a smudge of natural light to enter. Yet Yixing somehow manages to catch that slip of light in the deep brown curls of his hair, and his face holds such serenity that Baekhyun has to catch his breath.

Yixing’s fingers spring into action over the keyboard, calling forth the notes Baekhyun scrawled last night. Baekhyun closes his eyes and the ghost of a smile teases the edges of his lips. Of course Yixing finds the perfection in the music. How could he not, being the person he is?

Chanyeol’s bass line kicks in, not late exactly, not enough to be obviously off the beat, but Baekhyun’s eyes fly open, then go narrow. It is not quite there. It is not quite right.

 _Let it be,_ he forces himself to relax, to play his chords and try to pull the pace up. _It’s the first time he’s seen the music. You can’t expect perfection on the first try, no matter how much you want to._

So he lets Chanyeol continue, even though the slightly dragging beat makes his chest feel all wrong. He waits for Sehun to come in, and Sehun does come in. His voice is unpolished, yet strangely compelling, a mixture of roughness and softness, and there is a slight hesitancy in it so endearing that Baekhyun lets the younger boy continue for a few lines, even though it is clear to him from the first note Sehun sings that he can’t sight-read.

Then, when the wrongness builds to the point where it is beginning to make the world spin off-kilter on its axis, he pushes himself abruptly from the wall and flings up a hand.

“Stop.”

Disappointment hovers over him, ready to drop down, cover him, consume him whole. It wants to take his fragile soul and tear at it with claws and rend with teeth. He wants to rip the sheets from their music stands and clutch them to his chest like an injured hand, protect his music and himself from the murder they’re making of it.

He tells himself firmly to stop it. To toughen up. He can’t expect everyone to be like Yixing. This is what rehearsals are for.

They are looking at him, all three of them. Baekhyun feels the pressure of their gazes like hot pinpricks on his skin. They snap him into whiplash speech.

“Chanyeol, you’re behind. Keep up with Yixing,” he says curtly. “Sehun, do you call that singing? I wrote the melody for a reason.”

It sounds harsh, but Baekhyun doesn’t know how to soften his blows. He doesn’t want to either. If they can’t accept the truth, that’s their problem. He isn’t going to mask the truth in sugar-coated lies.

Sehun begins to make some excuse, and Baekhyun cuts him off. “Again,” he says, and steels himself inside.

They play again, and again. Baekhyun swiftly adds notes to the bass clef of Yixing’s keyboard score, forces himself to be patient when he has to coach Sehun through his phrases since the kid can’t even sightread. In contrast, Chanyeol can obviously read music as his notes are always accurate, but his rhythm is continually off, either a little too slow or a little too fast unless Baekhyun gives him a beat to follow by moving his hand in the correct time. He throws an irritated glance at the drum kit sitting empty and silent in the corner. Drums would keep Chanyeol in time. Drums would pull them all together.

“Why don’t we have a drummer?” The frustration is evident in his tone.

“They’re all caught up with the music program -” Sehun sounds nervous, which irritates Baekhyun immensely. Why should the kid be nervous of him? It’s not like he’s going to hurt him.

“I don’t care what they’re doing,” he cuts Sehun’s excuse off again. “Get one, or this isn’t going to work. I’m not going to fuck around with only half a band.” _It hurts too much,_ the words left unsaid at the end of his sentence ring through the silence.

Yixing is watching him, gazing at him with those eyes, those incredible eyes that are so gentle and yet so full of strength. Baekhyun refuses to look at him. He wishes Yixing would turn his gaze away. Why does it seem like when Yixing looks at him, he is seeing right through Baekhyun’s many screens and walls and staring directly into his soul?

 _Abandoned,_ the fear echoes deeply as if from the bottom of the darkest well. _Betrayed…_

Hidden at his side, Baekhyun clenches his fist. Yixing never abandoned him. Never betrayed him. If anything, it was Baekhyun who did that, who pushed his childhood friend away for reasons even Baekhyun doesn’t quite know. So why does that meaningless deep-down echo keep rising up from nowhere?

“Okay,” Sehun says hurriedly, jolting Baekhyun back into the present. “I’ll get us a drummer. I promise.”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Baekhyun walks slowly on the road between the school and his house, and the wind throws dead leaves and litter against his legs.

They have been practicing at every possible moment – lunch time, break time, staying after school until the head of the music department chases them out. Each time it is slightly better. Not good enough, not by any stretch, but improvement enough to give Baekhyun a glimmer of hope. It is a very small glimmer, fainter than the faintest star, but it is there.

And at today’s practice, Yixing found the secret hidden thread of hope that weaves its way through Baekhyun’s music.

Baekhyun is both shocked and not shocked. He hadn’t thought anyone would find that secret, but if there was a person who could, naturally it was Yixing.

He was harsh with Yixing. Defensive in his shock. His own words echo painfully in his ears. _Go ahead, since you know so bloody much._ If Yixing was anyone else, he might have snapped back at Baekhyun, might have said something equally cutting. Nobody would blame him. Nobody could deny that it is Baekhyun who is out of line. So why does Yixing accept Baekhyun’s words so easily? Why does he let Baekhyun hurt him?

 _He always was that way,_ his mind whispers to him. _Even back then._

Actions speak louder than words, so Baekhyun had let Yixing enhance the thread, bringing it out until it soars like a streak of light through the darkness. It is not so secret now, and the song is changed slightly, oh so slightly.

As the song is changed, Baekhyun is changed. The brief spark of hope is lifting inside him, and he feels the greatness within him stir. The beauty that he presses down is rearing up, tugging at the edges of his lips, bringing a sparkle to his eyes, no matter how hard he tries to suppress it.

He does not know the person who Yixing is making him. But maybe that person is not something to fear, after all.

 _Do I dare_ , he wonders, _do I dare?_

A flyer blows against his feet. Someone has dropped it. He looks up and finds his feet have taken him to the theatre. He crouches down and picks up the crumpled flyer. The photocopied names of the principal dancers burn out of the grey ink-clouded edges.

He puts the flyer in his pocket and slips inside the theatre.

The lady behind the ticket counter eyes him askance. She looks like someone’s mother, short permed curls and soft curves, dressed in an oversized tracksuit jacket with the dance school emblem on the left breast. He can see the suspicion circulating through her mind, and for a moment he sees himself through her eyes. A sharp-edged, skinny teenager with a metal spike in his ear, wearing half a school uniform over ragged black jeans - he must look like the least likely person to ever step foot inside a ballet theatre.

“Are you here for _Sleeping Beauty?_ ” she asks him dubiously. “It’s already more than half through.”

“You can still let me in though, right? My friend is dancing tonight.” He tilts his head and lets his hidden brightness slip up to tug at the corner of his lips and to shine through his eyes, and immediately senses her softening. He is not as bad as he looks, he can see her thinking. Perhaps he is a nice kid, underneath it all.

“If you slip in quietly,” she relents.

So he does.

He steals through the shadows at the very back and finds a seat at the end of an empty row. The theatre is only half-full and most of the audience are clustered near the front, where the stage is brightly illumined, shining on the colourful dresses of a group of small girls who jump and twirl in not-quite-unison. The emptiness is to be expected, Baekhyun realizes. This is only a dance school performance, and there are few apart from parents and relatives who would be interested.

The music swells. It is only a CD, played through a less-than-perfect speaker system, but the rise catches at Baekhyun and lifts him too. From the back he waits, and Yixing springs onto the stage.

Yixing’s perfection steals his breath and sends thrills of awe through his body. He seems carried by the music, lighter than feathers, light as air. When he jumps he hangs, suspended, for a beat so long that he surely defies gravity. His eyes seem to look into some far-off world only he can see. The lean muscles in his legs contract and stretch beneath his skin, rippling, shifting. He has complete control over his body and where it flies.

It is over too soon. Baekhyun waits impatiently as the courtiers move in ponderous ballroom dance. He wants more Yixing. He hungers for his perfection, for his beautiful control.

He is given it, near the end, when Yixing wakes up the sleeping princess and dances with her. Baekhyun doesn’t spare a glance for the girl, pretty though she is. She is nothing compared to the liquid light that is Yixing.

When the curtain falls, he pushes himself to his feet and slips away. 

It has rained while he was in the theatre, a brief summer storm already passed, and the dying wind tugs at his hair. The sky is starless black. The streetlights make pools of orange light on the wet sidewalk.

For once, Baekhyun’s world is not darker than the night around him. There is a glimmer of light. It is a very small glimmer, fainter than the faintest star, but it is there. 

“What the fuck is all this?” His father is waiting for him. The sour reek of alcohol is strong on his breath. Baekhyun’s eyes dart to the papers clutched in his father’s hand and horror shivers through him.

Has he forgotten to lock his drawer?

 _Foolish child_ , the fear rings piercing-sharp in his ears. You have brought this on yourself.

He knows his father’s prying ways, how he gets when the drink is in his blood, and that is why he locks his work away, his secret words, his poetry, the swirling-scratching nightmare drawings echoed from his dreams, and his music.

It is his music which his father holds now. Baekhyun sees his manuscript sheets crumpled in his father’s fists, and oh, it hurts as if it is his own heart which is being crumpled, as if he is a moth crushed in the grip of hands that never learned how to touch without hurting.

“Give them back,” he barely recognizes his own voice, strangled and strained. “They’re mine.”

“You’re writing music? What a joke,” the slur is in his father’s voice. He shakes the sheets at Baekhyun. “Think you’re a genius, boy? You’re a bloody idiot, thought I’d taught you that. Guess you need to learn it again.”

“They’re mine,” Baekhyun repeats, and ducks with the speed of much practice the swinging blow that aims for his face. But he cannot escape forever. Sheet music flies everywhere as his father grabs him by the shoulders and begins to shake him. His head rocks uncontrollably and his teeth clack together. He is being torn apart, the world blurs and twists, and he tastes the copper tang of blood.

And now he cannot breathe. His father’s fingers are tight on his neck. His lungs begin to heave inside him, dark spots crowd his vision, and desperation brings his fingers up to claw at his father’s face, scratching, tearing –

His father yells and flings him aside. His too-light body flies into the wall with a crack. He slides down and crumples on the floor. He curls himself up into a tight ball and waits for the kicks which come next.

“Little faggot,” his father slurs. His hand explores the red scratch Baekhyun has torn down his cheek and he shakes his head in disgust. “Fights like a fucking girl.”

And then he turns and leaves the room. No kicks tonight. The call of the drink is stronger.

Baekhyun gathers up his precious music with shaking hands, clutches the torn and crumpled pieces of love tightly to his chest, and escapes. He stumbles up the dark stairwell to the background music of bottles clinking together as the fridge is opened. He finds his way to his room, closes the door, and wedges clothes and textbooks into the crack beneath so that it may not be easily opened from outside. Then he takes a breath that shudders in his chest, and the papers crackle beneath his fingers, and the shadows loom.

Despair takes many forms in his room. In shadows and memories best left forgotten. In shame, dark and cloying. In the wrongness of his open drawer so carelessly left unlocked.

Well, it is shameful, is it not, that he evokes such responses from his own father?

There are four doors to deal with pain, and the first door of sleep cannot help him, and he does not have the key to the second door of forgetting, and he fears, oh he fears the third door of madness.

But to step through the fourth door of one’s own accord is a sin, and Baekhyun does not know if he believes in his mother’s religion – _do you dare_ sings the crucifix, cold against his chest, _do you dare?_ – but if he does believe -

There are things that can hurt him after death too.

He catches sight of himself in his mirror, sees the tangle of his hair and the desperation in his eyes. He steps closer and examines the beginnings of a bruise forming on the side of his neck. He can see finger marks, tell-tale signs of abuse. His school shirt collar, if he turns it up, will hide the blue bruising. He cannot bear anyone seeing his shame.

He considers leaving then. Running away and never coming back. It is not the first time he has thought of it. But he can’t. He has nowhere to go. Better to face the devil you know.

Besides, he tells himself, it isn’t all darkness anymore. Yixing is here now. Yixing has come back for him. Yixing will sing his hope out of the blackness of the night.

So tomorrow Baekhyun will live again,

return again like a moth to the flame,

and oh, how his wings will

_burn..._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

When Baekhyun arrives at school the next day, he knows at once that something is wrong. Whispers and echoes creep in the corners, sharp edges and gathering storm, and kids cluster around the lockers like vultures waiting for their prey to die.

Usually Baekhyun wouldn’t care what the other students are up to, but the feeling of something is wrong prompts him forwards, and without really knowing why he uses his sharp elbows to slip and wriggle his way to the front of the crowd.

What he sees then freezes him in place for a long, cold moment while his eyes process what he is seeing. Something deep inside him snaps with the sickening crack of a broken bird’s wing, and he begins to burn.

He leaps forward in a blaze of fury. Choi Dongwook looks up from where he has pinned Yixing against the lockers just in time to be knocked to the ground by the flying force of Baekhyun’s body. Baekhyun tumbles down on top of him and doesn’t even feel his elbows bash painfully against the floor. His lungs begin to burn, and it is only when he takes a breath that he realizes that the howl of rage that rings in his ears was coming from him the whole time.

He closes his mouth, swings his clenched fist back and slams it into Dongwook’s face. His mind is locked in exquisite anger - a ray of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass - a blade of tempered fire. The excited chants of fight, fight, fight from the other students reach him only dimly through the roaring in his ears. He grabs Dongwook’s hair and slams his head into the floor, again and again. 

Somebody grabs him round the waist, hauling him up and back. Baekhyun thrashes like a wild creature. The touch is burning him worse than the anger.

“Baekhyun, stop!” Distantly he recognizes Yixing’s voice, but panic at being restrained is overwhelming the anger, consuming him. He fights blindly against Yixing’s arms, and his elbow slips free suddenly and collides with something hard. Yixing’s arms slacken and he falls back with a pain-filled cry that sends a jolt of sudden clarity shooting through Baekhyun. All at once, everything stops.

He stands suddenly still and silent. An icy horror trickles into the hollow place the fiery anger has left in his chest. It rises, then floods, leaving him shaking and filled with fear.

Dongwook is sobbing on the floor, and Yixing’s hands are covering his eye, and there is blood everywhere. Baekhyun feels the blood drain from his face. He sways.

What has he done?

Teachers are doing crowd control, but Baekhyun pays them no heed. He stumbles forward and grabs Yixing’s arm. Horror is thick in his mouth and he can barely speak around it.

“Yixing,” he forces out. “I’m sorry - I didn’t mean to –" but he cannot finish before the heavy hand of the P.E teacher lands on him. Mr. Kang’s hand is large enough to completely encircle Baekhyun’s thin upper arm, making it impossible for him to break free.

He is half-led, half-dragged away from Yixing and down the corridor. Mr. Kang’s hand sends sickening shudders of glassy-eyed fear crawling through every part of him. _Get off me_ , he wants to scream, but his lips are bloodless and numb.

“Stop fighting me,” Mr. Kang snaps, and dimly Baekhyun realizes the teacher thinks he is struggling, but in fact, his stumbles and jerks are because he can barely keep his feet beneath him. His fear makes him want to fight wildly to break free, but he knows that if the P.E teacher was to release his arm, he would simply collapse, shamefully and uncontrollably, to the scuffled linoleum floor.

The hand on his upper arm burns, and the doors and windows are filled with staring faces that pass in a whirl and a blur, and 

_what is he, now,_

_always knew he was a bad one,_

_out of control, crazy,_

_like father, like son -_

“Byun Baekhyun,” the sound of his name drags him down from the sky of his white despair. They are not speaking to him, though. Mr. Kang is explaining what happened to the principal. His hand still grips Baekhyun’s upper arm, and Baekhyun droops from that grip like a puppet whose strings have been cut.

“….fighting in the hallway,” Mr. Kang’s voice fades in. “Gave Choi Dongwook a nosebleed.”

The principal makes a wordless noise that is somewhere on the spectrum between surprise and disbelief, and a bubble of inappropriate laughter suddenly threatens to escape Baekhyun. He understands the principal’s astonishment. It is rather hard to believe that someone as slight as himself could have possibly gotten the better of Choi Dongwook. He bites down on the inside of his lip until the temptation to laugh is lost in the taste of blood. Giggling now will land him in ten times more trouble.

Mr. Kang finally lets go of his arm, and Baekhyun’s knees buckle.

“Catch him,” the principal exclaims. Mr. Kang grabs his shoulders and hauls him upright before he hits the ground. He is manhandled into a chair, and the principal comes out from behind her desk and looms towards him, filling his field of vision with her wriggly grey curls and dominantly pink fluffy sweater.

“Are you feeling alright?”

“He’s white as a sheet,” Mr. Kang says. “He’s probably in shock.”

“Baekhyun, I’m going to give you a few minutes to calm down,” the principal’s voice is mildly concerned. “Sit there until you feel better. Then we’ll talk about what happened.”

“The bell’s five minutes gone,” Mr. Kang sounds hassled. “I’m supposed to be teaching 10B -”

“Go, then,” the principal says. She puts her hands on Baekhyun’s shoulders, and he tries to pull away from yet another invasive touch. Nausea floods through him and he retches, which, as it turns out, works better than trying to pull away, because she hastily lets him go and backs away.

“Are you going to be sick?”

Baekhyun shakes his head. He won’t be, now that nobody is touching him, but he thinks that she is lucky that he hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, or that angora sweater might not be so pink and fluffy anymore.

She leaves him alone then and retreats behind her desk, though still she watches him. He draws his knees up tight to his chest, rests his chin on them and waits for her to say something about his dirty sneakers on the chair. But she just eyes him beadily, sighs, and starts typing something into her computer.

Baekhyun closes his eyes, listens to the faint percussive taps of the keys, and wonders how long he can draw out this brief respite from persecution.

He hears the door open and close, but he doesn’t open his eyes until it eventually dawns on him that the voice now speaking to the principal belongs to Yixing. Then he opens them. He searches Yixing’s face anxiously. His eye, where Baekhyun’s elbow hit it, is slightly puffy, but apart from that Yixing looks totally fine.

The pieces of night that still whisper in the corners fade away, and the nightmare is banished. Yixing is okay. Yixing is here. Yixing has come for him.

“Alright, Yixing. I’m trusting you,” the Principal says. She sighs, pinches the bridge of her nose briefly. “Baekhyun, I understand the circumstances, but violence is never the right option. If you get into a physical fight again this term, it will be suspension. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Baekhyun manages.

“Alright. You may go, both of you. Actually, Yixing, take Baekhyun to the sick bay before you go to class. I think he needs to lie down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Yixing says, casting a worried glance Baekhyun’s way. He reaches out to take Baekhyun’s arm, but Baekhyun flinches instinctively. He hates himself for the response, because he sees the flash of hurt cross Yixing’s face, but he can’t help it.

Yixing understands, though, as they leave the office, because he doesn’t force him to go to the sick bay. Instead they walk together towards another place of healing. The music rooms. Baekhyun finds himself a safe place, a corner between the piano and the wall, and curls up there while Yixing plays the piano.

He lets the notes carry him and heal his soul. He feels their sweetness and their beauty run through him, soothing the bruises, chasing the fears away. The music is something he recognizes, and after a few bars he places it. Yixing is playing the music from the ballet last night, and Baekhyun closes his eyes and the ghost of a smile touches his lips as he recalls Yixing’s beautiful, perfect dance.

Sleep steals him without his conscious knowledge, the first door pulling his exhausted mind and body from the world. But it does not last for long. He thinks mere moments have passed when he becomes aware that his head is cushioned softly in someone’s lap, and someone’s hand is stroking his hair. He does not open his eyes. He barely dares to breathe. 

It is the first time in as long as he can remember that the touch of another person does not make him sick with fear.

So it is possible, after all, to be touched without being hurt.

Yixing’s hands are as soft as the whispering ocean, and for a moment, the world is perfect. He lets Yixing stroke his hair for a while. Then he slowly opens his eyes.

“Are you feeling better now?” Yixing asks.

“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun says softly. “I couldn’t stand Dongwook hurting you. I know I acted crazy.”

“It’s okay,” there is a smile in Yixing’s voice. “I’ve never been so well protected in my whole life.”

“I’m scared,” Baekhyun whispers. He sits up so he can look at Yixing more easily. “I lost control. I hurt him. I’m a monster.”

“No,” Yixing says, “that’s not true. There is so much beauty inside you, Baekhyun.”

_So much beauty inside you._

Baekhyun doesn’t understand. There is nothing in the world less beautiful than what is inside him.

The shadows creep. He is so sure he sees them, the small piles of bones and feathers, the staring eyes. He feels their cold hardness beneath his fingers. He feels them pressed to his face. He is so sure he hears their whispered secrets. They would tell him something important, he knows, if he could only understand…

He closes his eyes, clings tighter to Yixing, and the whispers fade.

It has been so long since he could bear a person’s touch. But here are Yixing’s arms encircling him, and here their skin is touching, and there is no pain.

Be not afraid, he thinks. Be not afraid.

Perhaps there is hope for him yet. Perhaps he can still be saved.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

_Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order;_

_And he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood,_

_and he stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son._

_-Genesis 22:10_

Baekhyun is made of thin, brittle glass. Most of the time he cannot bear the touch of human beings. Sometimes even Yixing’s gentle caresses are too much, and his friend has to tread cautiously around him still. One wrong touch at one wrong moment, and Baekhyun knows he will shatter, fly into fragments of blood-drawing sharpness,

_and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men_

_could never put Baekhyun together again…_

It is still early in the evening, but his father is snoring on the couch, surrounded by empty green bottles. Baekhyun watches him from across the darkened room with the wary stillness of a sparrow watching a sleeping cat. 

His phone vibrates against his leg and he pulls it out and checks the message. A text from Tao.

_What’s up? Haven’t seen you at lunch for ages._

_Been busy with music stuff. Sorry I never finished your tattoo._

_No worries. It was cool anyway. Rubbed off now, though._

_I can do a new one, if you like. Where are you?_

_Lu Han’s. Soojung and Seulgi just got here. Come over._

Christ, Baekhyun thinks. Lu Han’s party. Caught up in band practice and in Yixing, he has completely forgotten his friend turns 17 this week.

 _Coming,_ he types impulsively, before sneaking another glance at his father. He looks at the slack jaw, faded hair, and thin, bladed nose that looks far too much like Baekhyun’s.

If his father finds out he went out without permission…

“Fuck it,” he says out loud.

The party is raging by the time he gets there. Lu Han’s family have property on the outskirts of town, and dozens of cars are strewed haphazardly across the neighbouring field. Music booms from the house, loud enough that he can feel the bass vibrate in his chest. He tosses his bike into a bush and makes his way from the wide front porch to the back of the house where free-standing gas torches light the night and topless girls splash and squeal in a hot tub, apparently completely unconcerned about being on public display. The music grows louder, and Baekhyun’s head begins to throb in time to the beat. He wishes he could close his ears. 

He cranes his neck in every direction. There are people everywhere, but he cannot see Lu Han or Tao. He tries squeezing into the actual house by way of a set of French doors where a DJ is set up and people are dancing. Bad idea. In the crush he cannot avoid the contact of other people’s skin, and even the lightest brushes batter him like heavy blows. He quickly grows panicky. Then nauseous.

Someone shoves a bottle into his hand, but he pushes it away. He doesn’t care that he’s underage, but all the same, he won’t drink. He’s never been able to handle the idea of losing control.

“Take it!” The bottle-shover shouts, and Baekhyun is _this_ close to knocking the drink to the ground when he realises Lu Han’s older cousin is the one holding it. Zhou Mi, his memory supplies. “It’s only Coke,” the older boy tells him.

He breathes a sigh of relief, takes the bottle, downs it. The cold fizziness settles his nausea slightly, but it is still awful in here, and as soon as he finds Tao and finishes the tattoo he promised, he is getting out.

He doesn’t belong here. He knows that now.

“You seen Tao?” he shouts.

“Huh?”

“Huang Zitao!”

“Nope,” Zhou Mi shakes his head. His eyes are fixed on the dance floor. “Check out Soojung. Heard she’s on the rebound. I just did a shot with her. You wanna try her out?”

Baekhyun’s eyes follow Zhou Mi’s chin-jerk and land on Soojung. It is obvious she is wasted. Beyond wasted: she is a sloppy mess, sweaty hair loose and sticking to her face and bare shoulders. Forget one shot with Zhou Mi - there are at least fifteen shots written in the way her legs twist around themselves. She throws her arms in the air and dances beneath the spinning beam of a projected disco ball. She has no bra on, and her breasts shudder and shake with each flail of her body. To Baekhyun they look like flying udders, which is to say, gross, but the straight guys in the room clearly disagree with this assessment. They stop to gawk. And point.

Baekhyun looks away. The sick panic is rising in him again and his vision is going hazy. He has to get out of here, Tao’s tattoo be damned, before the scratch and beat of the music shake him apart.

He moves back towards the door, or tries to. The floor is tilting beneath his feet, sending him reeling and stumbling, bouncing off bodies as if he’s had as many shots as Soojung. Fear that has nothing to do with claustrophobia starts to rise up inside his chest as his hearing begins to dim. Then his vision. He feels drunk – at least he thinks he does, having no experience of the state to compare to. But all he’s had is a Coke. Right?

_What the hell did Zhou Mi give me?_

He groans aloud as the world seems to try to turn itself inside out, along with his guts. The sound of his voice is swallowed by the music worming its twisted way inside his head, trying to eat his brain.

It tasted like Coke, though, he wonders in hazy confusion. There was no odd flavour, no sting of alcohol.

Spiked, then?

_Shit._

He stumbles out onto the grass and his legs give out, toppling him face-down into the grass. He rolls onto his back. The sky is spinning, the stars blurring into a wheeling mess of light, and the world is spinning beneath him as well. He can feel its motion, sailing him through space. He is out of touch, out of body, reeling amongst the stars, and he should be afraid of this total loss of control, but the fear is distant, made remote and unreal by whatever has propelled him out here into the universe.

He wonders vaguely if Zhou Mi thinks this is funny.

“Dude,” someone shakes his arm, which does not appear to be connected to his body, and yet somehow still manages to convey to him the sick sensation of another person’s body invading his. Ants crawl over his skin and he shudders convulsively.

“What’s wrong with him?” The question is spoken way back down on earth, but Baekhyun recognizes Tao’s voice. Finally found Tao, but unfortunately there’s no way he’s going to be able to give the promised marker tattoo in this state. For some reason, this strikes him as hilarious. He giggles, distantly.

“Look at his pupils. He’s high as a kite,” someone else says. “Someone’s pushing crack on the kids.”

“Fucking idiot,” and Baekhyun wonders whether they mean Zhou Mi or himself. Either of them would fit the bill right now.

“What should we do?”

“I dunno. You know him?”

“Yeah. Should I call his father?”

 _No,_ Baekhyun cries, _no no no no,_ but he can’t find his mouth to let the panic out.

After an eternity and a second and a span of the moon, his father arrives, a tower of silent fury, tosses him into the car. Home, and he is dragged inside by the collar and hurled with brutal force against the china cabinet. Plates escape their display stands and fall to shatter in blinding starbursts over his head. Baekhyun’s body is made of rubber and lead and his head is reeling amongst the stars, but unfairly, he still feels every punch and kick that lands on him, until,

after a pain-filled breath of eternity,

it all just fades away.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Baekhyun flutters and struggles into wakefulness like a bird with a broken wing. Then he stops fighting and lies very still until he works out where he is. Of course – it is his own room, and he is splayed upon the unmade sheets of his bed, and his body is cold, _so cold_. Moonlight drifts through the air, a lost traveller on a dark night.

He must have passed out. The drug, or the pain from the blows - or perhaps the combination of the two - forcing him through the first door. The escape from pain so brief, so blissful. His father probably dumped him in his room when he was done with him. Baekhyun feels himself shudder at the thought of his father touching him while he is unaware and unable to defend himself, and pain runs through him at the convulsion.

Cold. He is too cold.

Baekhyun tries to sit up. He groans and falls back. Clutches at his side.

Every part of him hurts.

_So much._

He tries again. This time, he takes a deep breath, braces for the pain and forces his body up, all the way, moving against the ache in his ribs and the sting of his muscles. Once on his feet, he shuffles across the room on stiff legs to the far window. There he leans against the metal frame and stares out at the night.

Midnight silence. Nothing of interest is out there – neglected trees, old cars, small pieces of trash rolling around in the breeze – but still, something both ancient and new stirs within him. Like the sweep and turn of a compass dial, Baekhyun feels himself teetering on the edge of some temporal horizon, the narrowing border between now and yet-to-come.

There is a twist to the wind. There is a slant to the sky. There is a hole in his head that echoes with the cry of _abandoned,_ whimpers with the fear of _betrayed._

Like the origin of his fear, his truth is so close.

It lies stone-feather heavy,

cold and dead-eye glassy,

broken wing and broken bone ready,

just a moment away,

all while the wind knocks,

and whispers,

_get ready for your shine, boy,_

_get your soul good and ready_

_the end is coming_

_the truth will be here_

_soon…_

There is something wet on his face and he puts his fingers to his cheeks, takes them away, finds clear water there. It smells of salt.

_Am I crying?_

As if the thought releases some kind of dam within him, he finds himself crumpling to the floor, and the sobs come hard and painful in his chest, and he presses his hand against his mouth to stifle the noise – he must not be heard, _must not_ – and his body rocks forcefully with every tearing sob, and he is so afraid.

Without his conscious thought, his fingers slip into his pocket and slide across the surface of his phone. He realises it when the screen lights up and the dots ask him to connect them together, to unlock his last hope of salvation within. His hands are shaking so much he can barely trace the pattern, but there is only one thought in his mind. He touches a shaking thumb to his contacts icon, scrolls down the list of names until he reaches the one that seems to shine out at him with promises of warmth, of comfort, of trust.

_I need you._

His mind is screaming _no, no, nobody can know,_ but something deeper moves his finger, and before he knows it his phone is pressed to his wet cheek and he is trying with all his might to get his gasping, heaving sobs under control so that he can speak.

“Baekhyun?”

The voice is all he could have hoped for. Soft, slightly rough-edged with sleep, but warm, and the hints of confusion and concern break down the last shreds of Baekhyun’s willpower. He tries to speak, but all that comes out are the remnants of the cries that escape from between his fingers pressed over his mouth, high-pitched and whimpering, like a wounded animal.

A wounded animal is what he is.

“Baekhyun, are you crying? What’s wrong?” Yixing’s voice is turning more worried and alarmed by the second. Baekhyun tries to get his breathing under control. It is hard to believe that anyone could sound that worried about him, but the knowledge of Yixing’s sincerity glows through him and chases the fear of betrayal away.

Of course Yixing will not abandon him.

Yixing never would.

“Yixing,” he whispers, his voice catching in his throat. “Yixing, please…”

“Where are you? Your place?”

“Y-yes...”

“I’m coming.” Yixing does not hesitate for even a second.

“Sorry,” Baekhyun chokes the word out. He hears rustles and soft thuds down the line – Yixing is moving, and quickly.

“Don’t be. It’s okay. Don’t hang up,” Yixing tells him. “I’m getting my bike. Stay on the phone with me, okay?”

“Okay…” Weakness overtakes him. He curls up into a tight ball beneath the window as the world seems to slant and tilt again. The spinning sensation has returned, and the shadows whisper. _Come to us, boy,_ they murmur, _listen to what we have to say…_

“No,” he gasps, blindly pushes away with his hands. His phone has fallen beside his face and he distantly hears Yixing’s voice issuing from the speaker, but he can’t respond. The low takes him, dragging him into black despair. There are cold, still lumps surrounding him, a sea of them _so many of them_ broken wings cold blue-black dusty feathers and glassy staring eyes -

Birds. Dead birds, where no dead birds should be.

The symbol of his madness.

 _The third door,_ he fears it so much. _The third door…_

Death would be better.

He thinks of the razor blades in the bathroom cupboard, only a room away. They wait for him behind the mirror above the sink, singing his name with their high-pitched sweet, sharp song, but they might as well be on the moon for all the chance Baekhyun has of getting to them in this state.

 _I don’t need them,_ some part of his mind that isn’t trapped in the low speaks out clearly. _Yixing is coming._

“Please,” he mumbles from numb lips. “Yixing, please…”

And through the valley of the shadow of death, Yixing comes.

“Baekhyun,” his voice calls him like a shaft of light that falls down a dark well. Hands grip his shoulders, pull him close. Baekhyun wraps his fingers in the soft fabric of Yixing’s sweater and clings to it as if he has been saved from drowning.

“Are you hurt? Are you sick? Tell me what’s wrong,” Yixing pleads, and Baekhyun closes his eyes against his madness and finds his way to his throat.

“They spiked my drink…some fucking drug,” he gasps out. “The birds – they’re everywhere - their eyes…”

Yixing’s arms tighten around Baekhyun’s trembling body. “It’s okay. I got you. There are no birds, Baekhyun. They’re not real.”

“I know,” he mumbles into Yixing’s chest. His fingers twist tighter in the fabric.

“You’re bleeding,” Yixing’s fingers touch his forehead. Baekhyun flinches slightly at the shock of pain. “Did someone hit you?”

Baekhyun hadn’t realized he was bleeding. He recalls the china plates falling, starburst-shattering over his head.

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t lie,” Yixing sounds near tears. “Not to me. Baekhyun, please. Can’t you trust me? Even now?”

Baekhyun closes his eyes. Yixing takes his tight fingers and gently unwraps them from his hoodie. Then he clasps Baekhyun’s hands in his own, stroking the tension away. Baekhyun relaxes into Yixing. How safe it feels to be held by him, he realizes. Yixing’s graceful strength envelopes him. It shines through the darkness and chases the fear away.

“They called my father,” he whispers. “He was angry. Thought I’d taken drugs.” He laughs suddenly. “Guess he’s right, though I didn’t mean to.”

“He hit you?”

Baekhyun nods his head against Yixing’s shoulder.

“Don’t tell.”

“But –“

“Promise you won’t,” Baekhyun opens his eyes and looks desperately into Yixing’s. “I trust you.”

Yixing’s eyes are glimmering in the moonlight. Baekhyun reaches up a trembling hand, wipes the dampness from his cheeks, and Yixing’s eyes close, just for a moment.

“Okay,” he says, and Baekhyun breathes out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding.

Yixing shifts then, wraps Baekhyun’s arms around his neck and lifts him as easily as he might pick up a child. He walks over to the bed, places him gently down and then lies down beside him, arms around him. 

“Do you still see them?”

Baekhyun glances at the corners. They are shadowed still, but the menace whispering there has gone, and there are no dead lumps littering the carpet. “No. I think it’s wearing off.”

“The birds,” Yixing murmurs. He looks at Baekhyun. “You said the birds.”

“My nightmare. I don’t know where it comes from, but I often dream of dead birds.”

“You don’t know?” Yixing’s voice lifts, confused. “But Baekhyun…if it’s dead birds, don’t you think it would be from the basement?”

“The basement?” Baekhyun repeats. He searches his memory, rewinds, flicks though his photographic images and words for anything that connects dead birds with basements. And comes up blank.

“Remember, when we were kids? We weren’t supposed to go down there – I guess it was dangerous, those steps didn’t have a rail - but you weren’t afraid of anything. But I,” Yixing’s voice cracks, and he swallows. “I was too scared of the dark, so I ran home instead of following. You have no idea how much I regret leaving you there. If I had been braver…” he trails off, and his voice goes quiet. “Do you really not remember?”

Baekhyun feels like his world is collapsing, castles built on shifting sands crumbling into dust. If there is one thing Baekhyun knows about himself, it is that he remembers everything, everything that ever happened to him. But Yixing’s voice rings of truth and he has no reason to lie anyway.

“I don’t remember,” he whispers.

There is a silence. Yixing holds his cold hands between his warm ones, and they listen to the call of an owl float ghost-like through the night. _Abandoned,_ its lone voice cries. _Betrayed…_

“The second door,” Baekhyun murmurs. “The forgetting door. Did I step through it, after all?”

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

_Go, behold: I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves._

_But beware of men, for they will hand you over to the courts and whip you in their synagogues._

_\- Timothy 1:12-16_

There is the forgetting door, standing real and cold in front of him. It is painted wood, old and cracked and faded, and the ancient glass pane in it is rippled and clouded, so that he cannot see through it to the darkness beyond. Instead. he catches a glimpse of his own face. Hollow-eyed, twisted, distorted.

He has known this door for all his life. This dirty, peeling door in the hallway behind the kitchen. It leads to the basement. It turns out his mind learned to lock away pain behind the second door after all – locked it so completely that he had even forgotten the act of forgetting. Forgotten that there was ever anything to remember.

Only the images that came to him in dreams. They were not invented, after all.

His mother’s ghost whispers Bible verses through the hallway. They rustle around the corners of the room and slip between the cracks in Baekhyun’s skin.

 _Go, behold: I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves,_ she breathes, and that’s when Baekhyun remembers that suffering can have a purpose. That he can have a purpose, too. So he reaches with both arms and yanks open the door.

A rush of cold air hits him. It smells of spiders and despair. He stands on the edge of the cement stairs that lead down into the blackness, and a shudder runs through him.

Sometimes to end things, you have to go back to the beginning.

Only it isn’t his end he is facing.

It doesn’t have to be.

With this revelation, both freeing and true, a puff of fear floats from his shoulders, like the tiniest spark of earthly magic. Baekhyun stands tall as he takes his first step into the dark basement. Then the next. He keeps going and going, descending deep into the earth.

 _Wolves to the lamb,_ the wind whispers as it follows, swirling at his feet in its twisting, taunting way.

But he whispers back, “Lambs to the wolf.”

And his nightmares come alive.

For years his dreams have been haunted by images of dead birds trying to fly; rooks mostly, and Baekhyun has never understood why this was. But now, down in this horrible concrete basement, he is surrounded by bird corpses – the exact images of his dreams. There are not as many as he thought there would be – maybe five or six – but they spread out around him like a sea of horror, duplicating and blurring in his vision.

A soft sob escapes Baekhyun as he remembers. Oh, he remembers…

_He loves animals. They have kind eyes, and when they touch him there is never any pain. Or fear. But the birds. The_ birds. _It breaks his heart to see them._

 _It is just_ so sad.

_Baekhyun starts to cry._

_That’s when the sound of something slamming shut resonates through the concrete basement._

_His whole world goes black._

_Baekhyun stands, trembling, every hair on his body risen in fear. He bolts up the staircase, shoes crunching on shards of the broken light bulb, and pounds on the bottom of the door to be let out. He screams. He yells. He throws himself at the door and claws wood until his fingers bleed. But nothing happens._

_Yixing is gone._

_He is trapped._

_In the dark._

_Alone._

_He screams more. Fights more. All useless. Eventually his voice goes hoarse. Eventually his tears dry up. Eventually he curls up on the top step by the locked doors, draws his small body into a tight, tight ball._

_Time passes strangely after that, a tumbling roll of being that ceases to make sense. He can’t tell day from night. Sleep from wakefulness._

_Life from death._

_Sometime later, Baekhyun becomes aware that the birds are talking to him. From the black depths of the basement they whisper and chatter their truth to him. They use their minds, their broken fluttering wings, to communicate, to ease his fear. They understand that his wings are broken, too._

_Finally he slips back down the stairs and sits on the concrete floor, gathers them all into his lap, and picks them up, their bodies cold and stiff in his hands. Like seashells, he holds each ruined bird to his ear and listens to what it has to say. And after he is done listening, Baekhyun tosses them each into the air._

Yes! Yes! _The birds crow as they fly._

_And death, like the dark horror who calls himself his father, is inescapable._

But he is not alone. Not any more. And it is not dark, and the birds are just birds, just dead birds, and they do not whisper, and their broken wings do not flutter.

An arm is around his shoulders, stabilizing him as the tears pour down his face and his limbs tremble.

“Birds sit on the exhaust pipes from furnaces to keep warm, and they can get kind of drunk from the fumes and fall in,” Yixing says, calm and soothing in his ear. “Once inside, they eventually wake up and can't get back out. That’s all it is, Baekhyun. That’s all it is.”

Baekhyun lets Yixing hug him, and the fear that has plagued him for so long prises open a hole in his ribcage and slips out quietly and unseen.

The birds do not represent madness. The birds have an origin, a reason, an explanation. It’s just that they were locked away behind the second door. And the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that came from this hole in his mind, they were never true. Yixing was only a child, too. He didn't leave Baekhyun there on purpose. He couldn’t know Baekhyun would get locked in. Baekhyun feels the shadows lift away and the corners of the room are silent. Empty.

How strange it is, he thinks, that a child would remember so many things that would seem to an adult worse. He remembers every beating his father ever gave him, remembers every blow, every cruel word. He remembers his mother’s open coffin, her body made up to look like she is sleeping, and they tell him she is in Heaven, which is apparently a cold, dark hole in the ground, because that is where they put her.

But the dead birds whispering into his ear in the darkness left an imprinted horror that was stronger than all of that. All the imagination of a terrified child who got locked for a day in the basement.

_That’s all it is, Baekhyun._

_That’s all it is._

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

_But when they hand you over, do not worry about how or what you are to say;_

_for it will be given you in that hour what you are to say._

_\- Matthew 10:19_

The stage lights are bright – so bright they dazzle Baekhyun, flooding his eyes with hard, white light. But he does not blink. The reflex is his to control, and he resists it despite the stinging of his eyes. He walks steadily towards the front of the stage, his electric guitar a familiar weight against his hips.

He was afraid before, but the moment he steps up to the microphone he is engulfed by a strange serenity. Whatever happens now is not up to him anymore.

The future is already written. He reads it in the tilt of Sehun’s chin, defiantly confident as he adjusts his microphone. He reads it in the set of Jongin’s shoulders, the tightness of his fingers around his drumsticks. It is written in Chanyeol’s measured movements as he shifts the bass amp back slightly, lining it up on a certain angle with the drum kit – for what reason, Baekhyun cannot guess, but it has an air of rightness to it, as if Chanyeol knows something about the position of bass amps in relation to drum kits that Baekhyun doesn’t. It is written in the slender grace of Yixing’s waiting hands. It is written in the softness of his eyes and in the halo the lights make around his head.

And most of all, it is written in Baekhyun.

He is ready for his moment,

He is ready for his shine.

He is wise enough to know himself,

brave enough to be himself,

and wild enough to change himself while somehow staying altogether true.

“We are Uprising,” he says, and his words resonate all around the auditorium. Declaring them to the world.

He nods his head to cue them in. Yixing is behind him, out of his line of sight, but Baekhyun feels the change in the air as if he sees Yixing’s fingers spread ready over the keys.

The calm before the storm. The waiting stillness, poised, expectant, the empty universe full of nothing except for five small, unnoticed, downtrodden and uncared-for things – but when those things meet together and combine in just the right way, oh, then -

The universe explodes into being,

and the stage explodes into song,

and this is the way they rise.


	5. Chanyeol

The bleachers are too low. They force Chanyeol’s long legs to almost double up as he sits on them, his shins dangerously close to smashing into the heads of the kids sitting in the row in front if he makes a careless move. They must have been designed for elementary students – either that, or someone didn’t expect anyone over the height of 180cm to be sitting on them. Still, it means his knees that peep out though the holes in his black jeans serve as a good arm-rest for his elbows. He props his chin in his hands and surveys the crowd below him.

There is motion everywhere, excited arms waving, heads turning and jerking, mouths gaping, eyes widening and squeezing as the massed mixture of students chatter and gabble and cheer on their schoolmates. There are swatches of colour everywhere too – navy blue uniforms are directly across from him on the other side of the pool, a sky blue polo shirt-wearing school occupy the stand to his right, and a posh-looking set of scarlet-trimmed blazers and stylish kilted skirts fill the left. The section Chanyeol is cramped up in is full of the off-green and purple monstrosity of S.M Arts High, and Chanyeol has a shiver of gratitude that he is now a senior and no longer required to wear the appalling uniform.

There is a gap between races, and empty of swimmers for a few minutes the stirred-up pool water has a chance to settle. It ripples greenish blue, the surface molecules refracting the heavy yellow-tinted light that pours in through dusty, high skylights. The air is hot and tastes of chlorine and high-voltage excitement. The thumping vibrations of people climbing up and down the bleachers thrum through his body, and the energy of the writhing crowd presses against his skin. There is so much life here. So much feeling. It crawls over Chanyeol, ripples through him, filling him with sensory input.

He smiles, just slightly, an enigmatic lift to the corner of his mouth. He doesn’t care much about S.M High’s swim team, but the vibrating energy of the swimming tournament fills him up and makes him feel slightly less hollow inside. Slightly less cut off from the world. Slightly less alone.

The competitors in the next race move up to the blocks, the school they represent determined by the colour of their tight-fitting caps. He searches their faces, reading their expressions and body language. Some swimmers are intent with concentration or strong determination, and others are obviously nervous, tightness radiating from shoulders and eyes.

The swimmer from S.M looks relaxed as he jumps fluidly onto the starting block. His physique is impressive for a high schooler. Some of the boys he swims against are still skinny, not yet filled out to their adult builds, but this kid has well-developed abs, pecs and shoulders that will cleave him through the empty water like an arrow from a bow, swift and dangerous and full of grace.

The boy is Kim Jongin _._ Chanyeol remembers the name from the list of swimming events pinned up to the wall he’d glanced at earlier. The swim team captain. He stores the name up automatically in his mind, in case he ever needs to know it.

There is a waiting pause that draws all eyes to the starting blocks, and then the muscles of the crouching swimmers convulse in unison as they spring from the blocks and enter the water. Chanyeol nearly gets an elbow in the face as the kid sitting beside him starts waving his green flag frantically. His shouts are wordless at first, then, as the race continues, Chanyeol sees his lips change to form the words “go, go!” Chanyeol watches the boy for a while, amused at the multitude of expressions that cross his sharp-featured face. He’s one of those people who wears every emotion on their sleeve. Chanyeol likes that kind of person. It makes his life a lot easier.

He looks back down at the pool just in time to catch the ending – Jongin and the boy from the navy-uniformed school have touched together, and Chanyeol can tell by the confused glances the swimmers are giving each other and the way the line guards huddle together to compare times that the winner is unclear, and will be determined by the milliseconds captured by the stopwatches.

Motion to his right catches his attention and he turns to see Jongin’s supporter is talking to him. He focuses on his face, catches at the words.

“…he win? Did Jongin win?” The words are accompanied by a confused urgency of expression, and his body is full of motion that speaks _hope, nervousness, excitement._

“I don’t know.” Chanyeol glances down to the pool to see if anyone else knows yet, but from the corner of his eye he sees the boy’s expression change to one of such astonishment that it makes him look back, fighting a smile at how round his eyes have gone. But in glancing at the pool he’s completely missed whatever the boy said, and now the kid is babbling about keyboard functions and stabbing his forehead in some gesture that completely mystifies Chanyeol.

He raises an eyebrow enigmatically – a useful skill, as it can be interpreted to mean almost anything – and the kid turns back to the poolside. Chanyeol watches with interest as his eyes soften and his cheekbones go a little pink. Curious, Chanyeol follows the direction of his gaze and sees that the cause of this rush of desire is the sight of Kim Jongin pulling his muscular, gleaming body out of the water.

It seems the kid isn’t easily subdued or distracted, though, because he turns swiftly back to Chanyeol, and Chanyeol resigns himself to having an actual conversation.

“So why’d you choose green? School spirit or something?” The eyebrows are raised, the words tumbling over each other across his lips, and Chanyeol knows he is talking about his hair.

This question is not so easy to answer. Not that Chanyeol doesn’t know why his hair is green, but it takes more explanation than he is willing to trust his voice with, even in a place as obviously loud and echoing as the pool. He shrugs instead.

“No particular reason,” he says, and watches the boy’s face carefully for a response.

The boy blinks and his eyebrows twitch in a way that says _disbelief_ to Chanyeol as clearly as if he had shouted _liar!_ He opens his mouth again, but at that moment the navy uniforms opposite all leap to their feet and both of them look to the pool to find that the other school’s swimmer has his arms raised in victory. It can’t have been more than a split-second’s difference, but Chanyeol reads the slight slump of Jongin’s shoulders. _Disappointment,_ the boy’s body language says, even as he smiles generously and shakes hands with the winner. _Failure._

“Damn,” the kid who keeps talking to Chanyeol says. “We lost.” His words are an attempt at a cover-up, betrayed by the misery in his eyes.

“Second place isn’t losing,” Chanyeol points out, and then wonders why he’s bothering. It’s not like he cares if the kid’s upset. He doesn’t even know him. Yet there’s some intangible, innocent air about him that makes Chanyeol instinctively want to protect him from the world and its cruel indifference.

He shakes the feeling away. He has a class to get to. He bends down to slide his long, heavy rectangular case out from under the bleachers where he has stored it, and when he looks up again he finds that in doing so he has missed yet another of the kid’s attempts at conversation. He just manages to catch the last word in the sentence, and added to the direction of the kid’s gaze, Chanyeol deduces that the kid is asking him what’s in the case.

“It’s a bass,” he answers. “A bass guitar.”

He stands up and threads his way between the crowds. They part for him as he approaches. He’s tall enough to make people move aside instinctively, plus the green hair makes him look weird and a little scary, and people always get out of the way of that particular combination.

Outside he takes a breath of air that tastes of cool, burnt autumn and begins to stride across the quadrangle towards the main building. Halfway there someone darts in front of him out of nowhere, forcing him to jerk to a stop. Adrenaline shoots through him and his heart bangs hard against his chest. He bites back a yell of surprise – he _hates_ getting shocked – and glares at the person who has appeared so suddenly in front of him. It’s the kid again. What the heck does he want now?

“Sorry to call you that,” the kid’s chest rises and falls quickly, like he’s been running, “but I don’t know your name.”

He must have been calling for him while Chanyeol strode away. Must have thought he was ignoring him. Chanyeol tries to stop glaring. It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know.

“I’m Oh Sehun,” the boy says, sticking out a hand and smiling. He has a cute smile that softens the sharpness of his features. Chanyeol hesitates, then shifts the weight of his bass case into his left hand and takes the younger boy’s hand with his right.

“Park Chanyeol,” he replies, and waits to see what this strange kid wants with him. The answer startles him so much that he almost drops his bass case.

“Want to be in a band?”

At those six words, a flood of emotions pour over Chanyeol, because they are spoken so easily, so freely, and with so much hope.

Does he want to be in a band?

_Yes, yes, yes…_

How can he do that? It’s ridiculous to even consider it. He can’t play music with others. It’s impossible.

_No, it’s not. I can do it. I can._

They’ll think he’s stupid, or worse. They’ll find him out for sure.

_It’s impossible._

“Sure,” Chanyeol says, because that’s what he always says when that little voice inside his mind tells him _impossible._ That clenched fist, that sheer bull-headed stubbornness that won’t allow him to submit to the word _impossible_ despite the uncertainty and hopelessness and yes, the _fear_ that shivers and rattles through the emptiness inside.

The way Sehun’s face lights up at his agreement is more than enough reward for his courage. He tells him to come to one of the music rooms after school finishes and bounces away. Chanyeol watches him go and tries to quiet the emotions that clang through him, making echoes upon echoes of frustration and fear, playing him like a bell-tower.

He closes his eyes and with an inward breath he dampens down the uncertainty. He mutes the hopelessness. He catches the fear and soothes its quivering, cupped in his large, gentle hands.

It’s not impossible.

He won’t be afraid.

He will make it happen.

He will.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Chanyeol stashes his bass at the back of the calculus classroom and moves to take his customary seat in the middle of the front row, along with the smart kids and the ones who can’t see the whiteboard unless they sit as close to it as possible. Like those kids, Chaneyol knows the aching frustration of being locked out of understanding, but his problem isn’t as easily fixed as wearing glasses.

He gets his textbook, laptop and graphic calculator out of his backpack and glances through the section he revised in preparation for the class. He likes calculus. He likes the way the figures work. They are still, and calm, and don’t hide anything. They don’t say one thing and mean another. They don’t slur their words, or make crooked eyes, or judge. He doesn’t like the calculus teacher much though, because half the time she talks with her back turned as she writes on the whiteboard, leaving Chanyeol hopelessly lost.

He tries not to get angry. It isn’t worth it. He knows she does not – cannot – understand. He wouldn’t have understood himself, before he knew what it was like to be a castaway. A discard. A broken toy, left abandoned and alone. He tries not to care. But it is hard.

Today is more of the same. Miss Ahn writes figures and formulas at dizzying speed across the whiteboard, tapping certain things with the marker tip in emphasis, creating multitudes of little blue dots at each point. By the nods of the smart kids in his row and the confused expressions of the ones who are there due to short-sightedness, Chanyeol knows she is explaining things, and yet again he is secluded, outcast, locked in a bubble nobody else can see.

At least she writes the page number they’re meant to work from on the whiteboard. He bends his head and tries to forget his frustration in the complex equations. He’s good at concentrating. It’s not like he can be easily distracted. He loses himself in numbers, and dances figures through his head.

A hand comes into his view, landing on his desk. He jerks back in surprise and looks up to find Miss Ahn glaring at him with impatience and exasperation _._

“I find it hard to believe you are this keen for calculus, Chanyeol. I’ve asked you to stop working three times now. The bell’s five minutes gone.” She folds her arms defensively, like she thinks he’s mocking her. “Well, I guess it makes a change. I’ve never had to discipline a student for refusing to leave class before.”

Incredulity builds angry mountains inside Chanyeol. Is she for real? Has she actually forgotten?

His frustration has been too long held down. It surges and writhes, rattles at his edges, wants a vent, a way out. He glances around the room. It’s empty. He is the last kid there.

He closes his laptop, puts his books in his bags, all the while trying to calm the angry volcano inside him. When he has packed everything away, he stands up. His hands come up in front of him and he looks down at her. His face is schooled into his usual mask of calm, but he feels the glinting in his eyes.

“Miss Ahn,” he finger-spells her name as he speaks, letting the sign language emphasize his point as he vocalizes. “You forgot, right? I can’t hear the bell. I’m deaf.”

The dawning horror and dismay on her face is enough to give him a faint sense of grim satisfaction as he turns and walks away. But the satisfaction is short-lived, and does not do much to counter the hurt and restless anger inside him.

Forgot. She forgot. This thing that encompasses Chanyeol, traps him in an invisible, silent bubble every moment of his life, this monster that stole away the sound of laughter and birdsong and passing cars and creaking desks and the wind moaning through the tree branches, this disability that makes it so much harder for him to do anything the way the other kids do - ten times, a hundred times harder – it’s something so insignificant to her that she just…

Forgot.

He does not see her hand go to her mouth as he leaves the classroom. He does not hear her start to stammer an apology. And when instead of going to statistics he instead walks out of the school and through the gates and down the road and away from it all, nobody stops him.

Or if they try, he does not hear them.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The air is old and crackling and full of the skin-tingling sharpness of electricity. There is a sepia glow to the afternoon sun as it battles with the huge, monstrous dark thunderhead rearing and building and boiling up behind the hill. It lights up the leaves on the trees like daylight stars, and everything seems kindle-ready, burnt around the edges. Chanyeol keeps walking, and walking, and nobody stops him.

He walks towards the gathering storm. Everything is still. His scalp is prickly and the hairs on his arms rise up and stand at attention. He follows the street as it begins to climb the hill. It’s the tallest hill in town, topped with a park crowned at the summit by a lone, ancient tree. As he strides past the last bus stop, the sun is suddenly eclipsed. A cold shadow rushes over the street, darkening, and the tree leaf stars wink out. The storm is close now.

A sudden flash. Lightning scribbles across the sky. There is a tension in the air. A weight. A wait. There is no wind. The world grows stretched and tight. Automatically he counts – _one, two –_ and at the bus stop across the street two girls jump together, clinging to each other, their mouths stretched O’s of startled silent screams. Thunder.

It is close, but not close enough. Not yet. He crosses the line where the street ends and the park begins. He shuns the trail, taking instead the most direct route to the top, his long legs eating up the dusty ground as the hill climbs sharply beneath him. The grass is rising dry and expectant under his sneakers, as if it knows there will be rain to feed it soon, to wash its coat of autumn dust and colour its brittle blades green. His lungs begin to burn and soon he is panting. He is probably making all kinds of ugly gasping noises, but there is nobody around to hear them, so it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t slow down. He needs to get to the top.

He needs this.

His backpack grows heavy as he nears the summit, his laptop and textbooks all weighing him down. His breath is rasping fast in his throat now, and he needs his hands as well as his feet to pull himself up the steepest parts of the slope. He concentrates on the burn in his legs and lets all his anger and frustration and despair ignite and blaze out of him.

He hates it. He hates it so much he sometimes doesn’t know what to do with his useless self.

He reaches the top of the hill and stumbles towards the lone tree. When he is beneath its ancient branches he collapses on his back on the dusty grass and stares up at the spinning sky. His chest heaves. His heart hammers. His laptop pokes its sharp corners into his back and after a moment when he gets his breath back he wriggles out of his backpack and shoves it away.

He opens up his eyes, wide, wider, widest. Through twisting brittle-burnt leaves and branches he stares up at the coaly sky. Purple-black clouds boil and rage, and lightning splits the sky again and this time, Chanyeol feels the thunder. He feels it through his body, the deep crash in his chest, the pressure on his ruined eardrums. He feels the slightest tremble in the earth beneath him, and the wind rises.

He watches the lightning fork through the thunderhead and gives up his body to the storm. Every peal and crash of thunder overhead presses down on him, ripples over him, sings a silent song through him. Every scribbling forking cracking bolt of lightning inscribes a hundred after-images on his eyes. He knows that lying underneath a single tree on the tallest hill in town during an electrical storm isn’t exactly the smartest thing he could be doing, but he doesn’t care. He feels a strange sense of detachment, of almost inevitability. If he gets hit by lightning, he gets hit, and what’s the difference? He’s living on stolen time anyway. Death has held his hand once before, and though he was snatched away at the last moment, he didn’t return unscathed. The King of Shadows kept his hearing for his own, and holds it hostage now in his dark kingdom, waiting for the rest of Chanyeol to come and join it.

He knows he can’t stay away forever. Not when part of him is missing. Like a jigsaw with a missing piece, he will always be imperfect and incomplete.

If he gets struck by lightning here, Chanyeol thinks, then it was meant to be.

He will never know why he survived and Song Qian died.

Why take Song Qian?

Why not take him?

Why return him to a mockery of life, cursed to grieve in every moment for the part of him forever missing?

Now he is a guitar with a broken string.

Now he is a night without stars.

Now he is a cut flower waiting to die.

Hot, heavy tears leak from the corners of his eyes and spill down the sides of his face, pooling in his useless ears.

And then the rain comes,

bringing absolution.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Chanyeol is deaf. Carrying within himself this great, absolute silence, he walks alone, and his face is calm and empty. But if only anyone cared to look, his eyes would betray his burden.

The deafness changed him. It taught him many things. It showed him that the stable world is only an illusion. It can all catch fire at any moment and come burning down around you and there’s nothing you can do.

But after a forest has burned to ashes, from the destruction and dust a new life grows.

When the door to Chanyeol’s hearing slammed shut and locked forever, another, secret entrance to his soul cracked open. And so, sometimes, he sees beneath the surface. He sees feelings and emotions written across faces and bodies, clearer to him that spoken words ever were. Sometimes he catches glimpses of the truth, of the things people hide. He sees flashes of hidden greatness, of beauty, of terror, of madness and awe. It shines through the cracks in their masks and out of their window-eyes.

It scares him.

But it’s not always. Most of the time he is normal. As normal as a green-haired deaf boy can be. He clings to his normality. He needs to be treated like everyone else. Needs to keep up the pretence. That’s why he hides it. They cannot know. Their ignorance keeps the fear and the raging silence at bay. If nobody knows, it won’t be really real. What they don’t know can’t hurt him.

Most of the time.

When Chanyeol arrives at the music room, it is already populated with three others. Sehun is there, of course, quivering with nervous excitement. He grabs Chanyeol’s arm and drags him inside. His mouth is moving, but since he is standing next to Chanyeol and not facing him he cannot lip-read properly. He figures out Sehun is introducing him by the way the other two kids in the room respond. The curly-haired one behind the keyboard bows politely and gives him a soft smile. He looks familiar somehow, though Chanyeol can’t quite put his finger on it. The other kid is a whole different story. He gets a suspicious glare and a chin-jerk from this one, to which Chanyeol returns his most impassive stare.

Sehun probably told him their names, but he wasn’t able to lip-read them. He looks for name tags. No such luck with the sharp-edged kid. His uniform is in shreds anyway, he probably thinks he’s too cool for name tags. Chanyeol will have to scout out his name in some other way later, but at least the keyboardist is wearing his. Chanyeol reads the name printed there. _Zhang Yixing._

Shock rolls through him, and his fingers slacken momentarily on his bass. He masks his sudden confusion by crouching down to lie the case flat on the floor and snap the silver clasps open. He bends his head to hide his face. He pulls out the heavy guitar and clips on the strap, fingers fumbling more clumsily than they should.

When he thinks he is able to without shaking, he stands up and chances a glance at Yixing. His face is serene and his fingers dance across the keys. There is no trace of surprise in his face. No glint of recognition. He doesn’t remember Chanyeol.

Relief mixes with the shock and distress already inside him, creating a shivering concoction that rattles in his fingertips. He steadies himself in the familiar movements of plugging in his bass to the amp and adjusting the knob, helpfully labelled with the decibel measurements so he will know how loud he is playing.

Yixing doesn’t remember him. Well, it’s to be expected really. It was six years ago, and teenage boys change a lot in six years, and Yixing was always off in some dream-world of his own whenever Chanyeol saw him. Chanyeol wouldn’t have recognized Yixing either if it hadn’t been for the name.

A gesture from the angry guitarist makes Chanyeol glance across, just in time to catch a sarcastic twist of his lips as he knocks an electronic tuner out of Sehun’s hands. The device skitters across the table and spins around twice before coming to a startled stop. The others are watching the guitarist warily, like he’s a bomb that could be tripped at any moment, but Chanyeol just reaches across, picks up the tuner and clips it to the end of his guitar. He tries not to let the scornful glance from the guitarist get to him. He tunes, spinning the pegs down and slowly up, watching the needle of the digital display rise towards the mark, feeling the difference in the vibrations that shiver through his fingers as the strings change in tension until the note is in tune. He tries not to feel envious at the way the guitarist bends over his instrument with an intent listening expression and tunes by ear. 

“Baekhyun composed us some songs,” he catches Sehun’s words as the boy holds up a sheaf of handwritten music sheets, and finally Chanyeol knows the name of the angry guitarist. He takes his music and glances at it. The notes are written in spidery, rushed black scribbles. It’s barely legible, but Chanyeol is an expert sight-reader and he knows he will have no trouble with this. His fingers know where each mark on the sheet should place them on the neck of his guitar. 

He’s more worried about the rhythm. He can play in time when he sets his own speed, but he’s never tried to match the pace of other instruments before, and there is no drummer whose rhythmic motion he could follow with his eyes. He watches Yixing, hopeful for a tapping foot or nodding head, but he isn’t in luck. Yixing is obviously classically trained. No visible marking the beats here, and without a copy of the keyboard score to match with his flying fingers, Chanyeol can’t tell which bar he is on.

Anxiety begins to build up in his chest. He counts in his head desperately and when he thinks it is the right time he strikes his D string. His eyes dart from the music to Baekhyun and back, watching for signs that he is wrong. The guitarist’s eyebrows twitch, but he doesn’t stop them, and relief floods through Chanyeol. He continues playing, concentrating as hard as he can to try and keep the time he’s set. Sehun’s mouth opens and his eyes dart nervously. He’s singing.

After a few more bars Baekhyun throws up his hand in the universal “stop!” gesture and jerks his thin body away from the wall. He is practically shaking with the obvious effort of holding in a whole bundle of emotions. Chanyeol deciphers _anger, disappointment, frustration_ and a surprising glimpse of _pain_. In that brief, cloud-break moment Chanyeol sees the hidden way of him, flashing up to the surface like a glint of light reflecting off broken glass. Bitter and sad and sweet and broken. Shattered and brave and rough against the world. Deadly and dangerous as a sharp stone beneath swift water.

Baekhyun is a genius. The knowledge takes his breath away.

And the first words that shoot out of his mouth are the ones Chanyeol dreads the most.

“Chanyeol, you’re behind. Keep up with Yixing.”

He nods, keeping his face impassive, but beneath the surface emotions clang and tremble. _You see? You see? Idiot. How did you ever think you could play in a band? Ridiculous._

 _No, it’s not,_ he tells himself. _I can do it. I can follow them._ But despair is tugging at him, cutting his strings, making his limbs go limp and heavy. He watches Baekhyun correct the others – he wasn’t the only one wrong, as it seems Sehun has made mistakes with the vocal line – and when they play again, to his intense relief, Baekhyun marks the beat with his hand for a few measures. Chanyeol follows it, and they get further this time before he stops them again and starts working with Sehun for a while.

The next few times Baekhyun doesn’t mark often enough, and Chanyeol flounders. Baekhyun glares at him. “Too slow,” he says, then the next time, accompanied by a scowl of frustration and the more forceful lip movements that accompany a raised voice, “No! Now you’re rushing it. Listen to the others! Can’t you freaking _hear_?”

The words slash at Chanyeol like daggers. _No,_ he wants to yell back, _no I can’t freaking hear. Happy?..._ and at the same time, he wants to cry. _Sorry,_ he wants to whisper. _I’m so sorry. I’m breaking your music. I can see it’s breaking your heart._

But he doesn’t, of course. He can’t say any of those words, and so he says nothing. He forces the emotions down inside him, stoppers them tight, grits his teeth and makes sure his face remains still and distant. Nothing can touch him. That is what they should see, even if it is far from true.

“We need a drummer,” he sees Baekhyun say, and though he turns away and Chanyeol misses whatever he’s saying to Sehun, Chanyeol agrees with him wholeheartedly. He wants to be in this band so much. He wants to prove that he can do it. That there is no impossibility. That a deaf kid can feel the music too.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

The homeroom teacher hands him a slip of paper. There’s just been an announcement over the intercom, apparently – there’ll be a special assembly at 11am. Chanyeol nods his thanks to the teacher. At least some of them care enough to write things down for him. He wonders briefly what the talk will be about, and if he can be bothered to force his way close enough to the front so that he can lip-read the presenters. Usually this kind of thing is deadly boring and there isn’t much joy in the effort it takes to follow. All the same, he knows he should at least give himself a chance. It’s more frustrating when things are interesting and he can’t understand.

So at 11 he files into the hall with the rest of the student body and finds himself a place in the second row. He crams his long legs behind the wooden bench in front and watches the presenters and one of the teachers struggle with the projector. After a while the screen goes up and the words “Staying Safe and Healthy at School” flash up. Chanyeol stifles a groan, and the kids around him stir restlessly. It’s one of those.

He doesn’t bother to lip-read the presenter for the first part. The images and statistics that come up on the projector screen tell him they’re talking about the dangers of smoking, and the teacher who set up the video has remembered him, because the subtitles are on. He wrinkles his nose at a disgusting image of a smoker’s lungs. Why do they have to show them such gross things? Smokers will smoke because they don’t care either way. It’s not going to change anything.

The next topic, though, makes him tense up in his seat. His fingers curl stiffly around the edges of the wooden bench and a frozen feeling creeps through his hollow inside at the word that emblazons itself across the screen.

MENINGITIS

His eyes are fixed on the screen as the presenter begins to talk about the dangers of meningitis in teenagers. A list of things you can do to protect yourself comes up – it’s the usual stuff, wash hands, don’t share food, don’t share drinks, don’t share spit. A blinding image flashes in front of Chanyeol’s eyes – himself, passing a half-drunk yoghurt bottle to Song Qian – and he blinks, and realizes that his fingers have curled up into fists. He’s seen it all before, of course, all this useless hygiene information, but knowing it already doesn’t stop the pain, doesn’t drown out the guilt, because he knows it could be all his fault.

It gets worse. The screen begins to show pictures of victims. A girl with terrible scarring all over her arms and legs, a boy who developed brain damage and epilepsy, another who, like Chanyeol, lost his hearing. Then there is a video of an older lady who starts to tell them about how meningitis killed her daughter, but dissolves into tears half-way through the interview.

 _Like Song Qian,_ Chanyeol thinks. And then, with a chill of horror on someone else’s behalf instead of his, he remembers Yixing. Yixing, who was brought up not with his own parents in China, but with his aunt and uncle and cousin here in Korea. Song Qian was Chanyeol’s friend, but she was like a sister to Yixing.

He turns around in his seat, searching the rows of faces. There is a sudden surge in movement around the tenth row and several girls stand up, panic on their faces and mouths open. Chanyeol catches a phrase that ripples across lips down the hall and finds out that someone has fainted.

He stands up, pushes his way out of the row and strides towards the back of the hall, dodging a teacher who tries to intercept him. But as he reaches the tenth row someone else crosses his path. It’s Yixing. The younger boy pushes out of the double doors and the relief that fills Chanyeol that it wasn’t Yixing who fainted is quickly pushed aside by concern. The teachers are too busy doing crowd control to attend, so he follows Yixing out.

He doesn’t call after him - he can’t really tell how loud his voice is when he yells, and he doesn’t want to scare him. Yixing disappears around the corner of the gym, and when Chanyeol rounds the corner a few moments later he is already crouched down into a ball, his curly head pressed tightly against his knees. By the way his shoulders are shaking, Chanyeol can tell he is crying.

His heart aches. He wants to comfort Yixing, but fear and guilt are rising up in him, gluing his feet to the ground. He knows Yixing doesn’t remember him, but he is scared that he will eventually figure it out, and Chanyeol can’t help blaming himself. He didn’t have any more right to live than Song Qian. What right does Chanyeol have to offer comfort to Yixing? He could be the reason why she died.

If Yixing knows he is there, he doesn’t look up. Chanyeol watches him cry. His fists are clenched and his eyes are tight, but he doesn’t move forward. He can’t. He hates it. Hates that he is such a coward. Hates that he is unable to help Yixing. Hates that he lived when Song Qian died. Hates himself most of all.

The air grows bright and the raging silence gnaws at him. He can’t breathe. Panic presses down on him, a heavy hand upon his heart. He feels it and he fears it. He has to move. His knees feel loose and his muscles have turned to wet paper, but he manages to walk the few steps to get out of sight around the next corner before his legs give in. He puts both hands tight over his mouth to muffle any noises he might be making, and it takes him.

The sickness broke connections in his mind, sent him spinning slantwise and worse than different. It smothers him, the tangle, the wrongness and the fear, blocks out the world and traps him within it. At these times he must crouch down, bite down on his screaming, and he is the only one who knows, who really knows the safest thing to do is hide himself away and not, _oh God_ not let anyone see.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Chanyeol was eleven years old, and he’d caught the flu. It was a horrible flu, one that had him throwing up until he thought his stomach would shred in half, had him burning and shivering in turns with fever and confined to his bed, unable to move, but it was just the flu. It was normal to get sick in winter, after all.

Right?

The light hurt him. Even the tiny crack between the curtains sent spears of agony into his brain. His whole body ached right down to his bones, and his neck was so stiff and painful he couldn’t even turn his head. He felt sick, so sick and so dizzy, but there was nothing left inside him to throw up. He felt so awful he wished he would die.

His mother’s face, old with worry. Her hand, cool on his forehead while she talked into the phone. He couldn’t seem to make sense of her words. Then he was in the back of the car, lying on the back seat. He wondered distantly why his mother was letting him lie back there without a seatbelt on. She always made him wear a seatbelt.

Later again. Everything was white. He would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven, except that surely in heaven people don’t take off your shirt and hold you on your side while they stick a needle into your spine. He screamed at the agony of it.

And again. When he next opened his eyes, the pain was duller, and he knew where he was. He saw the blinking lights on the machines he was hooked up to and understood that he’d gotten sick enough to be taken to hospital.

But something was wrong. He saw the doctors speaking, their lips moving, but no words were coming out. There were no beeps from the machines, no mutters from the other patients, no rumble of wheels against the floor from the trolleys the nurses pushed around. Fear made a bubble inside Chanyeol’s chest and pushed its way up his throat to try and choke him.

He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t hear _anything_. Panic washed over him, and he must have been making noises himself, noises he couldn’t hear, because he was suddenly surrounded by nurses.

“I can’t hear,” he sobbed out, and saw the resigned glance they shared, and knew it was true. The knowledge tore him up and spat him out, tangled beyond all hope.

Later, they brought a small whiteboard and a marker to write on it with. They told him that he was in a coma for a week. They told him that he nearly died. It was a miracle, they say, that he survived.

 _Some miracle_ , Chanyeol thought as they wrote down the cold, hard facts. He was alive, but the sickness damaged his hearing beyond any hope of repair. He would be profoundly deaf for the rest of his life.

Despair made everything dark. He curled up on his side and took refuge in plucking a thread from the sheet of his hospital bed, working the little white thing out of its ply. A fish out of water. A boat in a storm, no haven in sight. He thought that he should cry, but when he felt around inside himself, he found he had no crying in him. He lay there like that, empty as an eggshell, hollow within in his cloak of raging silence.

Later, much later, when he was nearly recovered and beginning to learn his first words of sign language, they told him that Song Qian got sick too. That they must have caught it from each other. Apparently, Song Qian was in the same hospital at the same time as him, fighting alongside Chanyeol for her life.

But Song Qian lost the battle.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Yixing, it seems, is as good at hiding his emotions as Chanyeol. Chanyeol wouldn’t have expected it from such a gentle, open-faced boy, but when they gather that evening to practice, the only sign he can see of Yixing’s grief is a slight redness at the corners of his eyes, and that only visible because Chanyeol knows to look. It’s pretty impressive, because if anyone is good at reading emotions and body language not expressed in words, it is Chanyeol.

Sehun has brought his swimmer-friend to the practice, an excited smile on his face as he introduces Kim Jongin to them. Chanyeol watches the pair during the practice, noticing how often Sehun glances at Jongin, and at how shyly Jongin returns his smiles, how the drummer watches the singer as they play, instead of reading his music.

Jongin is like a beacon of light for Chanyeol. As long as he can see Jongin, he can follow the beat by the motion of his drumsticks. When Jongin strikes the drums hard, he can even feel the vibrations thumping deep in his core. It’s such a relief not having to struggle and scrape to get the beat right, and Chanyeol’s confidence grows. The air of desperation around Baekhyun fades away, and his expressions become less tense, and his hidden beauty begins to slip out and shine on them all.

There is a sense of something growing, something bright and delicate peeping out at the world. Not ready to show itself, not yet, but coming. Becoming. Nearly ringing true. Nearly clear enough to fill the echoing emptiness inside.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

They practice at Jongin’s house now, because the drum kit is the hardest thing to transport. Chanyeol doesn’t mind. It’s nice to meet up outside of school. It feels like having friends, and Chanyeol hasn’t had friends since he was thirteen. He hasn’t had anyone he wanted to trust.

Friends, though, don’t keep secrets, and Chanyeol can sense that there are still many secrets in the air, and he knows all too well how heavy hard-held secrets can become.

His own is the heaviest of all.

The ties that bind them together are so fragile, so thin - frail as the silvery strands of a spider’s web, as if one harsh gust of wind could tear them apart. Chanyeol can tell that Baekhyun is on edge today, more so than usual. Perhaps it is being in the new environment – they haven’t rehearsed outside of school before. Perhaps it is because the competition is only a week away. Perhaps it has something to do with the blue bruise on Baekhyun’s neck and the ones on his bony wrists that peep out from under his sweater, and the hollow, haunted cast to his eyes.

Perhaps that is why Yixing looks so worried today, constantly watching Baekhyun from behind the keyboard as if he thinks the guitarist might at any second stamp his foot and crack the world in two.

After a while Baekhyun turns to him.

“Chanyeol, sing a baritone line here, an octave lower than Sehun,” he commands. Chanyeol is used to the informal speech, but the unexpected command makes him freeze in sudden panic.

_Sing? Don’t make me laugh. You can’t sing. There’s no way a deaf kid can sing in tune._

And this time the voice is right.

He doesn’t know what his own voice sounds like. It hadn’t yet broken when he got sick. He has been told that is a rich, smooth deepness, but all he knows is the feeling of his vocal cords thrumming in his throat and the vibrations in his chest. He cannot sing in tune when he can’t hear his own voice.

 _Impossible_ taunts him, shakes him with its clanging deep inside.

“No,” he says, praying that his voice will remain as calm as he pretends to be. “Not me. I don’t sing.”

Baekhyun crosses thin arms and scowls. He seems to vibrate with barely contained frustration, like the taut plucked strings of his own electric guitar.

“What do you mean, you don’t sing? Everyone sings. You’re the only person here with a baritone. Just do it!”

“No,” Chanyeol repeats. He swallows at the misery that rises up to flood him. For a moment his eyes prickle, but he blinks hard and forces the tears away. He can’t let them see his secret. Can’t trust them with his pain. He silently begs Baekhyun to drop it, leave it alone. He cannot know.

Baekhyun’s lips paint brittle curses across the air. Chanyeol sees Yixing flinch and Sehun bite his lower lip. Baekhyun must be shouting now. His beautiful face is distorted, twisted with angry desperation. He takes off his guitar and slams it aside. All three of the others make a ducking, wincing motion, and Chanyeol understands belatedly that the amp has feedbacked. He would usually imitate such an obvious reaction, but he is still shocked at Baekhyun’s reaction, and he can’t make his body move in time.

Baekhyun turns and storms out of the shed. In his wake the air is thick with the bitter taste of ache and anger. Waves of horror crash through Chanyeol. It’s not his fault he can’t sing, but this misunderstanding has come about because of him. It’s his fault all the same. He is too afraid to tell them, too cowardly to trust them, and now Baekhyun is gone.

He can’t look at the others. Especially Sehun. He knows how much the band means to the youngest. He keeps his head down and tunes his strings. He can’t see their faces, so if they are talking to him, they will assume he is ignoring them. But he can’t speak now. He doesn’t trust his voice to be steady. Doesn’t even know if he can trust his face.

He twists the pegs, feels the change in tension of the string as it slackens, the vibrations going low and slow. He continues plucking and twisting, the slow and careful raise, tautening the string back up until the feeling of the note resonates true. And then he does it again. Over and over and over.

There is a change in pressure in the air around him, and he glances up to find the shed empty. Sehun and Jongin have gone. Left alone, Chanyeol lets out a shaking breath and rubs his hand against his forehead. He has no idea what will happen now. The world seems twisted, tilted on its axis, gone all wrong and blaming him for it. He starts playing bass riffs, trying to keep everything in place. Silent rhythms dance through the heavy pressure of the bass guitar on his hips. The strings sing beneath his strong fingertips.

It is not enough.

His eyes burn. The vibrations are a poor substitute for the hollow yearning inside him. _You have no idea how much I miss it. How much I miss hearing. How much I miss songs, and laughter, and thunder, and even angry voices. You have no idea how much I ache for music. How I wish I could hear your songs, Baekhyun. I’m trying my best. I really am. But I just cannot sing._

All the words he is too cowardly to say. 

He feels the panic rising in him then. He knows how quickly things can break. He does the things he can. He struggles and pushes his way through the world and hopes he will be safe. But still he knows. It can all come crashing down and there is nothing you can do. He knows he is imperfect, forever out of tune. He knows he has a missing piece. He knows he isn’t true. The tears break free from his eyes and slip down his cheeks, and outside, the rain begins to fall.

He swipes the tears away. His breath is coming harder now. His heart hammers in his chest. The light is too bright and he imagines he hears a sound, but it is something that no human could hear. A keening of the world torn out of place. A howl of everything all gone wrong.

There is no point in wishing. There is no point in praying. How many times he has tried to bargain with God, with Buddha, with the mountain spirits or the Jade Emperor or with anything who might listen. How many times he has pleaded and begged to be miraculously healed. He would do anything, give anything, if only he could hear music again.

But they do not listen. Chanyeol knows better now. You can’t make deals with gods. It’s not the way the world works.

The room is closing down on him. The walls are strange, the air too thick to breathe. His hands, no, his whole body shaking. He finds himself sitting on the floor, bass heavy on his legs. The light is like a knife against his teeth, and underneath it is the hollow dark. Silence swells and burns inside him and tears at him with its sharp dull teeth. Everything is heavy-quiet, quiet as the grave. He needs, _please he needs please please please_ …

He becomes aware of his guitar, lying heavy across his thighs. His fingers are shaking, too hard to move, but when he moves them he finds that it is not hard after all. He runs his hands along the surface of his guitar. It is so smooth and cool along its shiny front. And breathless, desperate Chanyeol bends forward and presses his forehead against its cool. He clings to it like someone in a shipwreck grips the stone of shore and breathes into his tight chest. And all alone he calms himself.

When it is over, Chanyeol picks himself up. He wipes the sweat from his forehead and the smudgy tears away from the cool surface of his bass with the cuff of his sweater. He rubs his thumb along the thick metal E string and feels the vibration through his skin. He lets the calmness seep back into him. Lets the world balance. He turns his eyes outward again, instead of towards the hollow inside, and he waits for the others to come back.

After all, most of the time, Chanyeol is normal. As normal as a green-haired deaf boy can be.

Most of the time.

After a while they do come back. Yixing’s arm is around Baekhyun’s shoulders, and Baekhyun is white to the lips. He looks ill, Chanyeol thinks. But he sits himself tightly on an amp and Yixing sits beside him, and Chanyeol senses that they have come to some kind of reconciliation. The other two burst in a moment later. Chanyeol eyes them. Sehun is as pale as Baekhyun, but it is a different sort of paleness - he is vivid, vivacious, and his eyes are sparkling bright. Jongin, on the other hand, is flushed rose along his cheekbones, and some strong emotion dances at the corners of his lips.

Chanyeol wonders, with a growing amusement that chases away the last echoes of the fearful dark, just what those kids have been getting up to.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

They are onstage. Chanyeol shifts the bass amp back so that he can see the movement of Jongin’s drumsticks. He plugs his guitar in and spins the knob to the right voltage. He knows the others are nervous, but he isn’t. He knows his part. He will play perfectly. He has practiced beyond the point of error, and the rest isn’t up to him.

Up front, Baekhyun nods his head, and beside him Jongin’s sticks jump into action, and Chanyeol counts the movements and comes in exactly right.

He can feel the bond they have between them, an invisible connection that draws them together, closer and stronger every day. There on the stage, they are not five individual musicians. They are one.

The lights are bright, but they do not dazzle Chanyeol. The music rolls over him, caresses his skin. He feels the delicacy of the keyboard notes, high and sweet. The electric guitar’s vibration is blue-white, sharp and soaring. He stands strong and brave and bell-tower tall, and the beats of the drums pulse through him, and the deep vibration of his own bass guitar rolls around his ribcage and echoes in his chest.

When the last tickles of the final chord have faded away into stillness, the five of them stand there, slightly dazed, all their love and light and music poured out and offered to the world. Chanyeol can feel the silence. He can feel the breathlessness. He can feel the suspended awe.

He knows what is coming.

He smiles, and every person in the audience is on their feet. Their hands move together wildly, there are open-mouth cheers, fingers-between-lips whistles, pumping fists. He feels the thunder of stamping feet through the stage floor. Even the judges at the front are applauding, turning to each other, lips moving. Chanyeol knows that their words will be lost in uproar, and he smiles broader. For once, he is the only one who knows what is being said.

He steps forward to Baekhyun and relays the words into his ear, and is rewarded by a smile breaking across Baekhyun’s dazed face, and oh, how it changes him. How beautiful he shines. Baekhyun tells Sehun, and Sehun tells Jongin, and Jongin pumps his fist wildly at Yixing, and then they are all crowding off the stage into the darkness and everyone is hugging everyone else, and it doesn’t matter that Chanyeol can’t hear, because everyone is speaking at once all on top of each other and nobody has a clue what anyone is on about.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

They’re in a waiting room, all five of them crammed up together on a leather couch that was surely only designed for three, their feet almost engulfed by the sinking plushness of a thick red rug. Behind the couch is a massive banner covered with sponsor logos, and in front of them an array of cameras and reporters. Everything outside of the camera view is bare, utilitarian grey concrete floor and whitewashed walls, but from the viewer’s perspective they are in the height of luxury. Chaneyol hides a smile. Things are not always as they seem.

They’ve given interviews. From the side view Chanyeol couldn’t really see what the others were saying, but he’d done his best to mimic their reactions, their smiles and laughter. Now the cameras are beginning to pack up. The director tells them to wait, because the sponsors will come out soon, and the director of one of the most well-known entertainment agencies in Korea wants to talk to them. Sehun is unable to contain his excitement as he bounces in his seat, tugs at Jongin’s sleeve, leans across his lap to beam at Baekhyun and Yixing. Exclamation marks tumble from his lips.

“We’ve done it! We’ve made it, guys! We’re gonna be world stars!”

Chanyeol doesn’t usually allow himself to laugh - he’s worried that it will come out inappropriately loud – but tonight he can’t help it. Their excitement and delight is contagious.

He has something to tell the others, though. He’s proven he can do it, proven his worth even when they didn’t know, didn’t make any allowance for his deafness. He owes them the truth. He doesn’t want to carry the weight of his secret alone any more, and finally, he thinks he has found the people who he can trust to share his burden.

So when the cameras are packed up and their mikes have been taken off and they’re waiting alone for the entertainment agency reps to make their appearance, he stands up and turns to face the others. He takes hold of his courage with clenched fists.

“You guys,” he says. They all turn to look at him and he sees the surprise on their faces – he never initiates a conversation. “I have something to tell you.”

He starts to sign his words as he speaks. It feels weird, showing them a part of him he’s kept hidden for so long. All of their eyes jump to his fingers.

“Chanyeol, why are you speaking sign language?” Sehun looks bewildered

“Because,” Chanyeol says, swallows, breathes. “I’m deaf.”

There is a pause. Everyone’s eyes are round. Yixing tilts his head to one side, his eyebrows drawn together in confusion. Sehun’s mouth is gaping open, until Jongin shuts it for him with two fingers beneath his chin.

Chanyeol watches them nervously. He’s afraid they will be angry. It’s a pretty big thing to hide from them for so long.

Baekhyun is the first to speak.

“That’s not possible. You couldn’t hear the music.”

Chanyeol smiles a little. “You’re right. I can’t hear it. But I can feel the vibrations, and I watch Jongin’s drumsticks to keep in time. I know where my fingers should go on the guitar. That’s all I need.”

“This isn’t a joke, right?” Jongin asks. “Hidden camera?” He glances around the room, as if searching for hiding film crews.

“It’s true. When I was a kid I got sick and lost my hearing.” He touches his ears, still signing as he speaks. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I don’t like people knowing.”

He glances at Yixing. His eyes are tight at the edges.

“Was it...was it meningitis?” Yixing asks. Chanyeol can tell his voice must be strained by the way the others look at him.

“Yes.”

Yixing closes his eyes. Chanyeol hesitates. He wants to ask if Yixing is okay, but the others are clamouring for attention, all three of them speaking at once. He focuses on Jongin, who is asking him how he understands what they are saying if he can’t hear them.

“I can lip read pretty fluently, and I get the rest by context and body language. There’s a lot I miss though. If people don’t face me when they speak or call me from behind, I’m lost. You probably know I have a reputation for ignoring people or being aloof and rude.”

“Incredible,” Sehun shakes his head. “I can’t believe it. You can’t even tell.”

Chanyeol grins. “I work hard to give that impression.”

“That’s why you couldn’t keep in time until Jongin joined us,” Baekhyun realizes. “And you moved the bass amp back –”

“- so you could see me,” Jongin interrupts, shaking his head in amazement.

“I’d like it if you’d keep it a secret,” Chanyeol says. “Only the teachers at school know. They have to in case there’s an emergency - I can’t hear a fire bell or emergency announcements. You guys are the first people I’ve told.”

Sehun jumps up, like he can’t contain his energy just sitting down. He bounces on the balls of his feet and grins widely at Chanyeol.

“Can you teach me sign language?”

Chanyeol’s fear is banished. This is a response he never gets. Perhaps he should have trusted sooner.

“Sure,” he grins, signing as he does so. “That’s the sign for yes.”

“What’s the sign for awesome?” Yixing’s emotions are under control again. Chanyeol shows him the sign, pinching his middle finger and thumb together and opening them out so his fingers face upward, the sign done at face height.

“Is there a sign that means uprising?”

Chanyeol laughs. There is a sign for an uprising, a revolution. It’s expansive, graceful, and when he shows them the others all copy him.

“Uprising!”

“Uprising is awesome!”

Put together, the two signs look like a dance move.

This is a dance to still music, and Chanyeol’s soul is dancing.

♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪♫♬♪

Once they were just small, forgotten, half-broken things, wandering silent and alone.

But together, they have found their purpose. They have found their shine. They are one. They are new. They are truer than true.

No more endings. No more failures. There is perfection hiding in every imperfection. There is light shining from every flaw. There is rain and starlight and azure and storm, and all of them are in them. Creating them. Completing them. And this is the way they rise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, made it!! Thank you so much for reading all the way through. Sooooooooo what did you think? Did anyone pick up on the clues in the earlier chapters about Chanyeol? Please consider leaving a comment if you want to, they make me really happy ^_^


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